Gotrek finds himself faced with the opportunity to slay a god. As you can imagine, he's quite keen on the idea. A different author, but he seems to have the basic characterisation down right.

I once lived in a house called The Willows. One day the next door alarm went off, and didn't stop. After banging on the door and calling the police, I discovered that the person living there was away in western Europe. The alarm kept going and going and going for weeks, and I had to go and stay with my girlfriend's parents becuase it was unendurable. I still had to pay rent. I don't know when the neighbour came back, but one day I went to the house and the alarm had finally stopped. I thought about knocking on the door and staring at the neighbour with eyes that were like ragged tunnels bored into eternally roiling clouds of relentless, hopeless, joyless grey, demanding they return what had been stolen from me, knowing that they never could. So I didn't.

This is a perfecrtly packaged piece of entertainment. A dystopia of grotesque economic inequality and exploitation, a cast of endearing and plucky misfiits out to better themselves and their families and escape their urban prisons, a film industry obscenely bloated with funding and profits, movies of action and spectacle where the exras are filmed fighing for survival against artifical alien monstrosities for rich financial rewards if they survive, a secret resistance within the industry helping the extras, unlikely alliances formed in the thick of battle, deeply moving connections with family and community. Honestly it's rare for a 'people fighting and dying for entertainment' story have so much defiantly uncynical-in-the-face-of-societal-horror heart. The build-up, the setting, the frenetic action, the self-regarding genius of the director behind it all are all absolutely pitch-perfect, and it all comes in just over five hours of listening time. 

"For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue."

Still one of the funniest things written in any genre. Jack Vance's magnificent Dying Earth, full of wizards and rogues and magic and monsters and danger everywhere with, every now and then, a hero. 

Stephanie is despatched to run in a beloved neighbourhood sweetshop owner for missing a court date, earning her the disapproval and enmity of everyone around her, until suddenly bodies are popping up everywhere, including the basement of the seetshop. There's also Lulu declaring herself bountyhunter's apprentice, car troubles, helpful advice and interventions from two orbiting man-hunks, threats, gunfire and junk food by the ton.

Also I'm not a robot Goodreads. Stop asking me if I'm a robot. Could a robot do this? *cries while drinking cold coffee*

HAHA MY PLAN TO READ LESS BOOKS THIS YEAR IS STILL ON TRACK HAHAHAHA GOODREADS THINKS I'M SOME SORT OF BOOK-READING ROBOT

Young Sophos, temporary heir to the throne until another one is born, gets kidnapped, is disguised with a bit of effective brutalirt, and hidden amongst slaves. Some fast thinking gets him away from his captors, but he is still a slave, and though he eventually escapes from that, his troubles really are just beginning, with his country at war, riven by civil war, and threatened by the manipulations of a hungry empire. 

Rousing, exciting, even swashbuckling stuff in a well-realised Mediterannean-flavoured fantasy setting. 

Yeeah, now I can see why these books caught on. Likeable lead, great supporting cast, and every book is a trip into some new part of London that may or may not exist. In this case, as the title suggests, it's underground, after the discovery of a murdered American art student under Baker Street leads Peter and Co, including a persistent FI agent he has to vainly try to conceal his magic spells from, down to the sewers and tunnels, smelly and wet and getting wetter thanks to meltwater from a city-paralysing snowfall. The narration is fabulous, top-tier, full marks for naiing the South Dublin accent, even narrators who manage decent Irish accents rarely bother with regional variations unless the character is from Ulster

The gods are real, and they are AIs and they feed on our souls in return for their patronage. A scientist leads a reasearch team on a space station to further human-based science, and it ends in disaster, and than intrusion by something called The Outside, a kind of heresy thst threatens humanity and the gods. Kidnaped by angels and forced to hunt for the mentor who encouraged her research, she soon finds that the Outside has struck her home planet, with the only options to cure or destroy, and nobody really thinks there's a cure. 

Read by Simon Vance, now there's a guarantee that you'll enjoy listening to it, regardless of what 'it' is, but this audacious mix of Patrick O'Brian, Susanna Clarke and some unpsecified author who wrote lots about dragons, sorry I've never read anything like that, oddly enough, with dragons added to the Napoleonic War, sounds daft, but works indredibly well. It helps that the author takes great care with the language of her characters as well as developing rather touching relationships, such that it's horribly alarming when these loveable vulnerable massive warmonsters and their affectionate ruthless mass-murdering pilots go into battle, even though I'm sneakily root for the French, though in all sorts of ways they're not that much better than the Brits, Empire-wise, they did at least send us a platoon in 1798 for all that in the end they got paroled and we got fucking slaughtered. I refer you to my review of The Year Of The French. If the Brits had dragons in Ireland they'd have started doing that 'throw prisoners out of helicopters thing' a few centuries earlier, only with dragons, who would have also eaten the prisoners. No! Honestly, I really liked this, it was great, I love the Aubrey Maturin books too, but come on, I'm never going to fall too much in love with any arm of the British armed forces in any era. But this was great

Low comedy, high satire, and the question of whether personalities that are transferred from meat to robot are the same person, and whether this is the future of humanity, or whether it's a good idea at all. With rebel robots on the moon about to engage in their own internal conflict, their creator is offered a chance at immortality, but is he going to be freed from sickness and death to live potentially forever or is he going to me merged into a single vast consciusness, or is it all the same thing?

Very early cyberpunk has this weird characteristic of looking and sounding noting like what we think cyberpunk should, and this seems more like some sort of surreal slacker stoner beach-bum comedy, only with robots on the moon. Nonetheless it's all here if you look closely enough.