My Media Intake

Audiobooks For July 2024

Time for the next batch of audiobooks to queue up to listen to. Got 13 audiobooks to listen to this time…

Wayward Pines:

The Wayward Pines Trilogy (2012–2014) is a mystery/thriller/science fiction novel series by American author Blake Crouch. It follows U.S. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke as he unravels the mystery surrounding his unanticipated arrival in the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, following a devastating car accident. The novels are Pines (2012), Wayward (2013), and The Last Town (2014). In 2015, the novels were adapted into the television series Wayward Pines.

Overview The plot surrounds Secret Service agent Ethan Burke’s introduction to the remote small town of Wayward Pines, his new home from which he cannot escape. The residents of this picturesque town don’t know how they got there and are forbidden to talk about their prior lives. An electric fence surrounds the town, and the residents are under 24-hour surveillance. The mysteries and horrors of the town build until Ethan discovers its secret. Then he must do his part to keep Wayward Pines protected from threats both within and beyond the fence.

The series covers themes of isolation, bucolic Americana, time-displacement, man vs nature, human evolution, and cryonics.[citation needed] Crouch has acknowledged that he was inspired by the 1990–91 TV series Twin Peaks.

Magicians of the Gods:

Graham Hancock’s multi-million bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods remains an astonishing, deeply controversial, wide-ranging investigation of the mysteries of our past and the evidence for Earth’s lost civilization. Twenty years on, Hancock returns with the sequel to his seminal work filled with completely new scientific and archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light…

Near the end of the last Ice Age 12,800 years ago, a giant comet that had entered the solar system from deep space thousands of years earlier, broke into multiple fragments. Some of these struck the Earth causing a global cataclysm on a scale unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least eight of the fragments hit the North American ice cap, while further fragments hit the northern European ice cap. The impacts, from comet fragments a mile wide approaching at more than 60,000 miles an hour, generated huge amounts of heat which instantly liquidized millions of square kilometers of ice, destabilizing the Earth’s crust and causing the global Deluge that is remembered in myths all around the world. A second series of impacts, equally devastating, causing further cataclysmic flooding, occurred 11,600 years ago, the exact date that Plato gives for the destruction and submergence of Atlantis.

The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. But there were survivors—known to later cultures by names such as ‘the Sages’, ‘the Magicians’, ‘the Shining Ones’, and ‘the Mystery Teachers of Heaven’. They travelled the world in their great ships doing all in their power to keep the spark of civilization burning. They settled at key locations—Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Baalbek in the Lebanon, Giza in Egypt, ancient Sumer, Mexico, Peru and across the Pacific where a huge pyramid has recently been discovered in Indonesia. Everywhere they went these ‘Magicians of the Gods’ brought with them the memory of a time when mankind had fallen out of harmony with the universe and paid a heavy price. A memory and a warning to the future…

For the comet that wrought such destruction between 12,800 and 11,600 years may not be done with us yet. Astronomers believe that a 20-mile wide ‘dark’ fragment of the original giant comet remains hidden within its debris stream and threatens the Earth. An astronomical message encoded at Gobekli Tepe, and in the Sphinx and the pyramids of Egypt, warns that the ‘Great Return’ will occur in our time…

Fingerprints of the Gods:

Fingerprints of the Gods is the revolutionary rewrite of history that has persuaded millions of listeners throughout the world to change their preconceptions about the history behind modern society.

An intellectual detective story, this unique history audiobook directs probing questions at orthodox history, presenting disturbing new evidence that historians have tried – but failed – to explain.

Lost Ark Dreaming:

The brutally engineered class divisions of Snowpiercer meets Rivers Solomon’s The Deep in this high-octane post-climate disaster set in near-future Nigeria.

Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level. There are also those who were left for dead in the Atlantic, only to be reawakened by an ancient power, and who seek vengeance on those who offered them up to the waves.

Three lives within the towers are pulled to the fore of this conflict: Yekini, an earnest, mid-level rookie analyst; Tuoyo, an undersea mechanic mourning a tremendous loss; and Ngozi, an egotistical bureaucrat from the highest levels of governance. They will need to work together if there is to be any hope of a future that is worth living―for everyone.

Brave New World:

Originally published in 1932, this outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before.

“One of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century”—Wall Street Journal

Cloning, feel-good drugs, antiaging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media—has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller’s genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 AF (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, Brave New World is both a warning to be heeded and thought-provoking yet satisfying entertainment.

Britney Spears – The Woman in Me:

The Woman in Me chronicles Spears’s journey to stardom, the publicized challenges she faced, and her endeavors to break free from a longstanding conservatorship that once controlled her life.

In the beginning of the memoir, Spears writes that her paternal grandmother, Emma Jean Spears, was sent to an asylum by Spears’s paternal grandfather. Their three-day-old baby had died and Emma Jean was overwhelmed by grief. While at the asylum, Emma Jean was put on lithium; later she shot herself over the child’s grave. Spears added that “tragedy runs in my family”.

Spears also writes that she was marketed as innocent, even though she had been a regular smoker since the age of 14 and lost her virginity around the same time. In 2002, her then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake dumped her by text on the set of a music video. When she became pregnant by Timberlake, she writes that he persuaded her to undergo an abortion. Spears writes that Timberlake continuously cheated on her: “Photographers caught Justin with one of the girls from All Saints in a car.” After the break-up, her public image suffered, she started to burn out, and began abusing the prescription drug Adderall. She also admitted that she cheated on Timberlake with dancer Wade Robson.

A Cyberpunk Saga꞉ Box Set, Books 1-3:

He has discovered their terrible secret, but can he take down the world’s largest mega-corporation before it’s too late?

Orphaned and alone, Moss is happy to have found a place in the world. But his humdrum working routines take a terrifying turn when a mysterious woman breaks into his apartment and hands him a data chip from his dead parents. Suddenly hearing messages revealing his benevolent employer has a far darker side, he braves the dangerous megacity streets in search of the truth.

Surrounded by outcasts and criminals and running on instinct, Moss stumbles onto a rebel group intent on exposing their corrupt oppressors. And though he fears for his life when his old boss has put a price on his head, the naïve man believes the key to taking down the enemy may lie inside the high-tech device…and his own cerebral cortex.

Will Moss’ attempt to fight the power cause him to terminally short circuit?

Now in one place, get the first three books of the international best-selling series A Cyberpunk Saga. If you like everyman heroes, realistic characters, futuristic tech, and immersive dystopian worlds, then you’ll love Matthew A. Goodwin’s mind-expanding epic.

This epic box set contains the first three books of the best-selling science-fiction series with bonus content.

DNA – The Secret of Life:

Fifty years ago, James D. Watson, then just twentyfour, helped launch the greatest ongoing scientific quest of our time. Now, with unique authority and sweeping vision, he gives us the first full account of the genetic revolution—from Mendel’s garden to the double helix to the sequencing of the human genome and beyond.
Watson’s lively, panoramic narrative begins with the fanciful speculations of the ancients as to why “like begets like” before skipping ahead to 1866, when an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel first deduced the basic laws of inheritance. But genetics as we recognize it today—with its capacity, both thrilling and sobering, to manipulate the very essence of living things—came into being only with the rise of molecular investigations culminating in the breakthrough discovery of the structure of DNA, for which Watson shared a Nobel prize in 1962. In the DNA molecule’s graceful curves was the key to a whole new science.

Having shown that the secret of life is chemical, modern genetics has set mankind off on a journey unimaginable just a few decades ago. Watson provides the general reader with clear explanations of molecular processes and emerging technologies. He shows us how DNA continues to alter our understanding of human origins, and of our identities as groups and as individuals. And with the insight of one who has remained close to every advance in research since the double helix, he reveals how genetics has unleashed a wealth of possibilities to alter the human condition—from genetically modified foods to genetically modified babies—and transformed itself from a domain of pure research into one of big business as well. It is a sometimes topsy-turvy world full of great minds and great egos, driven by ambitions to improve the human condition as well as to improve investment portfolios, a world vividly captured in these pages.

Facing a future of choices and social and ethical implications of which we dare not remain uninformed, we could have no better guide than James Watson, who leads us with the same bravura storytelling that made The Double Helix one of the most successful books on science ever published. Infused with a scientist’s awe at nature’s marvels and a humanist’s profound sympathies, DNA is destined to become the classic telling of the defining scientific saga of our age.

Paradise Lost in Space:

Tony Robinson and David Haig star in this black-hole comedy about two space-age humans stranded on a friendly alien planet.

Norman is an idealistic, Beethoven-loving revolutionary. Max is a boring but cheerful timeshare salesman who won’t stop talking. Fellow passengers on a flight to the Moon, they’re thrown together to become reluctant companions after the lunar shuttle’s toilet cubicle explodes, crash-landing them both on the desert sands of a distant alien planet.

They are rescued by the friendly Oblivions, who could not be more delighted to see them. Having spent six years learning English from a discarded volume of Noël Coward plays, they’re keen to practise the lingo – and learn more about the many mysteries that have baffled them. How do you mix a Martini? How does one play tennis? And what on Earth is misery?

Norman and Max are about to answer all their questions – as well as introducing them to fire, contemplation and baked potatoes. But their well-intentioned attempts to share the secrets of racquet-based games and sophisticated cocktails soon backfire. Perhaps providing the Oblivions with the priceless gifts of human civilisation wasn’t such a good idea after all….

Written by Colin Swash, whose numerous TV credits include Have I Got News for You and Mock the Week, this sci-fi sitcom stars Tony Robinson as Max and David Haig as Norman. Among the co-stars are Geoffrey McGivern and Lorelei King (The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy), and guest stars include Alistair McGowan, Peter Serafinowicz and Ronni Ancona.

Starship Troopers:

In Robert A. Heinlein’s controversial Hugo Award-winning bestseller, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe—and into battle against mankind’s most alarming enemy …

Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids.

Because everyone in the Mobile Infantry fights. And if the training doesn’t kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job …

Join the Army and See the Universe. That is the motto of The Third Space War, also known as The First Interstellar War, but most commonly as The Bug War. In one of Robert Heinlein’s most controversial best sellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the universe – and into battle with the Terrain Mobile Infantry against mankind’s most alarming enemy.

The Hollow:

Dr John Christow is a successful physician and leading researcher, although very tired and irritated by his current life. On the morning that he and his downtrodden wife, Gerda, are due to travel down to the country to weekend with friends, Christow allows his little daughter to tell his fortune with cards. When the death card is drawn, he pays no attention, but the appearance of an old flame at The Hollow seems to be the final link in a chain of fatal circumstances.

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