Perdido Street Station Audiobook

" The text of Perdido Street Station has problems of focus, and a lack of reasonable conclusion (the conclusion doesn't work well on any level -- an unhappy ending that made sense would be O.K.) But on top of that, John Lee's read doesn't do the text justice at all. There's plenty of heavily ornate exposition of space and place and smell in the text, but the overwrought speaking of it only makes it feel all the more off-putting. There also cases of getting the tone all wrong. The Ambassador of Hell's voice echoes sound ridiculous, the Construct Council's avatar's waver is annoying, as is the fight between the Handlingers and the Moths, completely failing to identify a scene climax, and repeating elongated sounds and screams over and over. Its a difficult text to do justice, and the strange otherwordly things like the Weaver or the Moths are a challenge, but John Lee does not come close to meeting the challenge. "

" Narrator so annoying. "

" Amazing book, just takes a little effort to get through the first 1/3 "

" Well, I read this as part of a book group read and I have to say that this was disappointing. Mieville was really creative in creating this unique world, but in my opinion he was in dire need of an editor. I've heard it said that this book reads like he sat w/ a thesaurus next to him the whole time, and I have to say that I agree with that analogy. Deep down, underneath it all, I think there's an interesting story and I pushed on to find out what happened. Once I got there, I had to ask myself "what the?" It really made me wonder if I could've made better use of my time reading something that I would enjoy? Sorry. "

" Love this book so much. "

" It's brilliant and it will probably spoil a lot of the lesser (but not altogether awful) offerings of the genre for the rest of your life. "

" I tried twice to read this novel because of Mieville's reputation, but it's just not happening. "

" A compelling story of friendship & betrayal among a variety of sentient and pseudo-sentient beings, set in an elaborately fantastic sci-fi world. Each Mieville book I read makes me a bigger fan. "

" Too weird by half. Or maybe three-quarters. "

" Good book. Takes a while to get started. "

" Fantastic piece of world building. The characters are fascinating and fairly deep, but nothing goes well for anybody. Sad, sad ending. "

" Sometimes a bit over-descriptive, contained some redundant and off-topic paragraphs or chapters (depending on what you want the book to be), but man, what a fantastic and tremendously strong ending. Also, the ambiance it portrays is great. "

" Good concept, love the visual descriptions. I would love to see this made into a movie. "