I listen to things as I work, and sometimes that's podcasts, sometimes it's audiobooks. Looking for suggestions on audiobooks, preferably fiction. Sci-fi, fantasy, urban fantasy, but anything goes. Bonus points for long, consistently good series since, as mentioned, I listen to it daily as I work, so we're talking dozens of hours per week.
What does everyone like and recommend? Thanks.
Hope everyone is having a good weekend, too!
The Dresden Files series is narrated by James Marsters and he does a DAMN good job at it. I have all of them, well worth the time.
The Dresden Files revolves around an abusive relationship between Harry Dresden and Karrin Murphy.
Murphy knows for a fact that Harry is a mage who can say things to cause rooms to explode and people to die. She keeps insisting on absolute transparency from Harry, and when he withholds information to protect her life, she gaslights him into admitting that he is an abuser.
Murphy keeps leading Harry on and using him fucking ruthlessly to play cop regarding supernatural forces that she is utterly unequipped to even understand, all the while gaslighting the fuck out of him.
As a survivor of an abusive relationship with a ruthless narcist who used police and the law to further abuse me, this whole book was toxic fucking sludge.
The author doesn't even acknowledge what is happening and the fan base can't suck Murphy's cock hard enough.
It gets worse in the following books.
You have been warned.
This is not accurate to the series in my opinion. To anyone who hasn't read it yet I'll try to avoid spoilers.
The core dichotomy in the series is the distinction between people who have a clue, and normies. The supernatural community has a sort of Geneva Conventions of their own, and a core rule of it involves keeping normies ignorant or scared.
Harry flouts this by placing himself in the yellow pages. He's spent most of his adult life butting heads with the idea of keeping normies in the dark, but even he himself understands that some of this crap is secret for a reason. The supernatural world of the series is one consisting of about 5% relatively benevolent beings, 20% creatures who consider humans a nuisance, and 75% predators.
Case in point, vampire groupies. In the series people who find out that vampires are real frequently try to make contact with them because they think it'd be cool, and end up as food. More than once in the series, people who Harry helped by giving them some knowledge of the supernatural end up killing themselves with it. In one of the books it is brought up that it is completely possible to learn dark magic without having any natural talent at magic at all.
Harry himself is effectively a paroled murderer. In his past he killed his old master with magic, claimed self defense and got off on a technicality. The series explains in the post Dead Beat arc that 99 times out of a hundred the governing body of wizards just executes you for this on the spot.
This combines into his attitude towards Murphy. Who, and I'll agree with you here, is worst girl and it's not even close. Hell I'd take a couple of the one off side girls over her.
Dresden is on the books for Chicago PD as a psychic consultant, something which is pretty much paying his bills in large part. As a ranking wizard he essentially is psychic anyway.
Murphy's character starts out as a normie and represents the emergence into having a clue. She doesn't understand the rules and regulations of the supernatural order, the real world behind the facade, and wants to bend them to modern day mortal law rather than accept the truth of reality. Which eventually she does, at the cost of her job, position and reputation.
Each of them condescends towards the other. Reality condescends to the facade and the facade to reality. Same behavior, but only one of them is right.
That's the underlying theme of the books. At least the first arc of the series anyway. Willful ignorance.
I think this is a fair take. And, yeah, that her bad behavior is never acknowledged, she isn't called out, and she doesn't really learn and grow is probably the worst part, I agree. I'd say she gets pretty decent, and definitely has her good qualities, but in the first book or two it's true she's largely shit.