A perfect book for napping!

I was surprised that a very large portion of this book is dedicated to explaining what is going on in the book. In fact, it struck me a book that contains another book that describes the first book. Now, this may seem odd but, it also seems to anticipate that people will nod off to sleep when listening to the book. If they do, it is a very clever technique because it helps ensure that the listener will not have to worry about missing anything because it will all be explained again shortly.

Another feature that makes this book perfect to listen to when you may fall asleep is the plot development. It is so painfully slow throughout the series that, even if you fall asleep and miss some detail, it won’t matter because the plot never advances far enough in an hour or two to leave you behind.

Of course, there are the parts of the novels that are dedicated to describing various scenes in great detail. It is almost as if the author is describing what is happening in a movie to a blind person. This too has a soothing effect that trended to encourage me to just close my eyes and listen. What better encourages peaceful napping than that?

Then again, there are the characters. They are all unambiguous and one dimensional to the point where they are all nearly interchangeable. The good guys are all the honorable boy scout types and the baddies act within the confines of their own roles. So, when you fall asleep, it wont matter who is talking when you wake back up.

Then, there is the narration. It seemed to me that the narrator was fully aware of how tediously slow the story progresses and tried his best to compensate by reading the parts just as fast as he could to hold people’s interest in spite of the foregoing. Sadly, this really does not help people who find the need to take naps during the story. However, I was able to fix this by slowing down the playback to 90% of normal. Problem solved!

Now despite all this, I can say that I listened to the first three books in their entirety and the pause between deciding to spend a credit on more of the same was not overly long. But, perhaps I got carried away in those instances. However, before getting the last book in the series, I think it appropriate to sleep on the decision.