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By Sean Clark, on January 8th, 2013  I used to listen to a lot of audiobooks in addition to reading a lot of books. Now I primarily fill that aural space with podcasts, though I do still like to keep an audiobook or two on my phone, just in case.
 What value! When I was listening to them avidly, Audible was my service of choice. They have a great selection, decent value in their monthly memberships, and a great app complete with “achievement badges” for frequent and taste-diverse readers. For older books, I frequented LibriVox, which has a huge database of free audiobooks from the public domain (namely Project Gutenberg). The quality varies; it seems a lot of the readers are either actors practicing their recording voices (good) or advanced ESL learners fine-tuning their fluency (not so good), but I found it to be a great way to passively absorb many of the classics I’s never been able to get around to reading.
 UI is nice enough, but hardly worth even $2. The Audiobooks HQ app by Inkstone Mobile, is a paid iOS app that plays and organizes these free LibriVox audiobooks. It also draws from another database, Globe Radio Repertory, which as of this writing had a whopping 4 titles to choose from, albeit good ones. That’s it; I couldn’t find a way to load an audiobook from an outside source, or to add some other database to draw from.
I’m not sure why you would spend money for this app unless you are a sucker. The UI is nice enough, I’ll give them that, but I’ll go ahead and save you $2 and recommend you just get these free books straight from LibriVox, open them with iTunes (whose UI is better), and bypass these middleman vultures altogether.
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[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]
By C4 Staff, on December 27th, 2012 Dear C4 friends,
We hope you have enjoyed a festive December, whatever your holiday of choice may be. The final episodes of The Page Count’s 12 Podcasts of Christmas are now live. We hope you’ll forgive the deterioration that happened as our long day of recording podcasts for you progressed. If you enjoy this even 1% as much as we enjoyed recording it, we couldn’t be happier. Thanks for reading and listening, and thanks for 3 great years; we look forward to all the fun to come as we set out on the site’s fourth. See you in 2013!
Mazel tov,
Aaron, Eric, Marc, Nico, and Sean
  
  
You can either stream The Page Count episodes from the player below, or you can subscribe for free on iTunes or your favorite podcast player by searching for “Page Count.” Links and show notes can be found here.
By Sean Clark, on December 24th, 2012 [This marks my third year of doing one of these end of the year roundups for story-centric video games. I guess it's a thing now. You can check out previous entries here, and look for my new bi-monthly column on wordy vidyagames coming debuting sometime in January.]
As I mentioned in my Best of 2012 post, this has been a pretty hectic year for me. Right along with not being able to read as many books as I’d have liked, I didn’t have much time to play games either. When I did, it was mostly on a Sunday morning when I should have been studying or on the train when I could sneak in a half hour with my 3DS. So while my pool to draw from is a little shallower this year, it forced me to choose only the games I really wanted to play, making my choices much easier. Here are the 10 games I played this year that scratched my inner book geek game itch.
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Fez (XBLA)
Before even getting into the story stuff, this game looks and sounds beautiful. It’s got one of the better soundtracks for a game this year (this is my favorite–seriously check it out.) The game is fun too, a mix of 2D and 3D spatial platforming where pretty much the whole point of the game is to explore. Where this game will really tickle your inner nerd though, is when [bit of a spoiler] you realize the game has its own written language and philology that you can investigate and use to your advantage. It’s really hard to explain without giving too much away. If you’ve got an XBox you should download Fez.
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999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (DS)
A lot of my train ride game playing was spent with games like 999: “visual novels” that are more akin to a choose your own adventure book or 90′s computer adventure games than your typical modern fare. The plot is pretty captivating. You wake up in a strange room and quickly learn it is a death trap that you will only survive if you can solve a puzzle. Soon you meet other characters, each with a particular back story and idiosyncrasies and you must find a way to work together to escape (it’s a lot like the movies Saw or Cube, but with a glossy, Japanese sheen). There is no way you can actually beat the game on the first try, you will die, and have to start all over. At first this infuriated me. But since you are able to take your experiences (and knowledge of the other characters) into account the next time around, you can make different decisions. When eventually you reach the “true” end, it’s a bit of a mindfuck that makes it all worth it–one of the better bits of plot writing (in any medium) I’ve encountered in a while.
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Dust: An Elysian Tale (XBox)
What starts as a pretty looking button-masher that feels a bit like the Secret of Nihm cross-bred with Sanjuro, turns into a deep and pretty damn dark story that is about as affecting as a game about a bunny rabbit rönin can possibly be. While the setting and gameplay differ greatly, the basic layout has a distinct Metroid feel to it, which I always appreciate.
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Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 3 (XBox, iOS, Steam)
The first two games in this series, based on the popular web comic, were good but not great. When the series was cancelled, Zeboyd Games, the two-man outfit who made the excellent Cthulhu Saves the World was tasked with bringing their own style in to revive the series. It worked out great. The game’s look and feel will feel right at home to any fan of 16-bit RPGs and the writing is sharp and funny. You can get this for a song on a number of platforms.
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Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney (DS, iOS)
This was the first of the “visual novels” I got into this year. There’s not much game here, but the story is fun and engaging. You are a defense attorney, and you must interview witness to learn information, then make objections and present evidence at the right times to clear your clients’ names. It’s not grounded in reality at all, so the plots are crazy and the characters varied and quirky. It might be a little too Japanese-zany for some tastes, but if this sort of game is up your alley, the $5 asking price for the up-rezed iOS version is a steal.
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Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)
I’m a huge Zelda fan, and to be honest this game left me a little disappointed. My expectations of Zelda are a bit unreasonable though, and it’s by most all accounts a very good game–one of the best pieces of software for the Wii–it just focused a bit less on exploring than I would prefer a Zelda game did. The trade off for that, however, is the increased focus on storytelling. For a series of games that are largely similar in plot, it’s interesting to see Nintendo finally focus on characterization and actual dramatic themes. It sets out to be an origin story that coheres a lot of otherwise hard to sync plots from previous games and does an admirable job of pulling it off.
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Little Inferno (WiiU, Steam)
This isn’t so much a game as a toy. Basically it’s a fireplace simulator. I know, doesn’t that sound enthralling? It’s actually pretty engrossing. The game situates your television or monitor (or the WiiU gamepad, but it looks really nice on the TV) as your new fireplace, and you have mail-order catalogues from which you can pick out things to light on fire. The combustible stuff is weird, from spider eggs to toy cats stuffed with fake poop, and you progress by burning “combos” based on wordplay or themed clues: for instance for the clue “Cold War” you must burn “Uncle Sam’s Blam Blams” and “Russian Nesting Dolls” at the same time. Occasionally you’ll get letters from a neighbor, and weather updates from some crazy guy in a balloon, and from these a dark, Tim Burton-esque story of the apocalypse begins to form. It’s a great little diversion, and it comes from good pedigree, as this company’s last game, World of Goo, was solid fun.
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Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
This is probably the best looking game on the aged Wii. It’s a sprawling, lengthy game, and a ton of fun. It’s fairly difficult to explain the plot, but basically it’s a fun cross of sci-fi and fantasy; the world is a real pleasure to explore. The characters are all interesting, if a bit boilerplate, and though the combat systems take a little getting used to, once you get the hang of things it’s easy to appreciate the innovation. Definitely worth the time for RPG fans, just make sure you’ve got a lot because the average length for this beast is 65-100 hours.
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The Last Story (Wii)
From the creator of the original Final Fantasy comes one of the better RPGs of the last few years. It’s fairly short, but that works to its benefit. Most of the systems are streamlined and uncomplicated, so you get to focus on the story. The story doesn’t do anything too original, but it does tell itself quite well. The real strength here is the cast of characters. It’s not often enough a game actually devotes time to nuanced characterization (FFVI and Mass Effect are on a short list of examples I can think of), so the payoff here is excellent. If you have a way of playing Wii games, this one is a must. (And if you don’t, go here and now you do.) As a bonus for us book nerds, the game is packaged to look like a book.
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The Walking Dead (XBox, PS3, PC, iOS)
I love the Walking Dead comics, and have a love/hate relationship with the TV show (I currently am leaning back toward loving it). This game is without a doubt better at storytelling than either (and for the most part uses unique characters). It’s set up as episodes, with 5 currently available as the first season and (hopefully) more coming soon. There’s very little playing; it’s more or less an animated choose your own adventure story. But the choices you have to make range from uncomfortably dark to down right grisly. Will you let a woman in distress continue to agonize loudly as human bait being eaten alive in order to grant your group more time to escape, or will you put her out of her misery with a bullet to the head? Choose fast, if you hesitate she suffers and you won’t benefit… I played this on the XBox, but if you have an iOS device its touch interface is probably the best way to take in the experience.
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Honorable Mention: Paper Mario Sticker Star
A charm-soaked offshoot from regular Mario fare, the Paper Mario games are much more story-focused semi-RPGs. This one goes the extra mile in the visuals department, using the 3DS’s capabilities to render the whole game to look like cardboard shoe box dioramas. The story here isn’t very meaty, but the writing is pleasantly witty and self-referential.
By Sean Clark, on December 20th, 2012  Day 4 of the Twelve Podcasts of Christmas is now live. We spent the last two days rounding up our C4 picks for the best books from this year (and some old ones thrown in), and today’s episode has us somewhat hypocritically discussing what value, if any, Best-of lists have.
You can see the full final list of C4′s Best Books of 2012 here.
You can either stream The Page Count episodes from the player below, or you can subscribe for free on iTunes or your favorite podcast player by searching for “Page Count.” Links and show notes can be found here.
By Nico Vreeland, on December 19th, 2012  It’s Day 3 of our Twelve Podcasts of Christmas marathon. In Day 2, we started discussing our favorite books of the year, and today we finish that discussion. Listen to either below, find us through iTunes or get our raw feed for other players.
The coming days will feature a heated round of the Kakutani GameTM, devised by Marc Velasquez, some readings of embarrassing poems and stories that we wrote in high school,the continuation of Eric’s technically malfeased drunk review, and much much more. Stay tuned!
By Nico Vreeland, on December 18th, 2012 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
Everybody’s doing their best-of lists for the end of the year, so there aren’t too many good reviews out there these days. Additionally, I believe I’m currently composed of 50% “holiday food” which is itself 50% fat and 50% essence of laziness.
This is a coy way of saying that we’re not gonna be sticking to a regular schedule for the rest of 2012. We’ll still have plenty of stuff—12 podcasts of Christmas, and some assorted reviews might still make it in—but we’re letting WBBR (along with our veneer of professionalism) go by the wayside until after Belsnickel returns to his farmland home.
Have a happy holiday, and we’ll see you next year.
By Sean Clark, on December 17th, 2012 We decided to mix things up with The Page Count this month. Introducing the 12 Podcasts of Christmas! The gang locked themselves in an apartment with some microphones, santa hats, and enough beer and blueberry moonshine to kill an average-sized elf from liver failure. We’ll be releasing the results in bite-sized podcasts over the next week and a half. Enjoy, and have a happy Chrismahankwanzika.
(We apologize–again–for the audio quality. We’re still trying to figure out how to best include our New Orleans correspondent but with our normal set-up, adding him in contributed to losing episodes. You’ll notice in these ones that we really nailed it for his audio, but now the rest of the gang is pretty quiet. Fear not, we’ll make sure the audio quality is top notch for my Drunk Review double header of Victory at Yorktown and Monday Night Jihad.)
You can either stream The Page Count from the player below, or you can subscribe for free on iTunes or your favorite podcast player by searching for “Page Count.” Links and show notes can be found here.
By Mike Beeman, on December 17th, 2012 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their favorite books from the past 12 months and beyond. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009, 2010, and 2011 while you're at it. This is the final piece of our 2012 series.]
So it’s that time of the year again. “Best of” season. We all know that “Best of the Year” lists are completely subjective, a handful of famous writers are over-represented, the idea that anyone can read a broad enough range of books published in a given year to judge which is among the best is obviously ridiculous, etc. But, hey, they are also kind of fun. I read a lot of good books this year, the vast majority published before 2012, but here are three I read in and of this year that stand out (and one from a previous year for good measure):
 May We Shed These Human Bodies, by Amber Sparks
It’s hard to believe this is Amber Sparks’ first book: most of the short stories in this collection have appeared in some of the indie lit world’s best-known magazines. With multiple publications in Annalemma, The Collagist, Unsaid, Pank, Gargoyle, Barrelhouse, and others, Sparks’ surreal and quirky stories were already ubiquitous both online and in print by the time this collection came out. It’s easy to see why. The stories in May We Shed pack a lot in their often few pages, forming mini-fables that combine timeless themes with modern sensibilities (see Death and the People, where a jaded Grim Reaper interrupts the all-powerful gods as they play Mario Kart). Sparks’ tales offer enough variety from story to story to avoid too much repetition. Reading this collection is like dipping into pockets of complete surreal-yet-recognizable worlds, and the only complaint I can think of is that sometimes Sparks lets us out too soon.
 Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain
Fountain earned my undying fandom when I first came across his amazing short story “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers” in the 2005 O’Henry collection. In a very strong collection, this story was a stand-out. Although he made us wait for Billy Lynn, famously shelving a novel he struggled with for years, the wait was worth it. Billy Lynn follows the members of Bravo Company, soldiers recently made celebrities from a viral video of their action in Iraq, as they are treated to the Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game. Steeped in pop culture, fluidly switching between past and present as the nineteen-year-old soldier Billy Lynn muses on his life and sudden celebrity, Fountain digs deep into what it means to be returning from war and preparing to leave for war again. Although his extensive research shows on every page, what impressed me most was not Fountain’s accurate portrayal of the soldiers, which was spot-on, but the way he captures the non-soldiers, everyone else—i.e. you and me—as we approach the soldiers to mumble thanks and platitudes about honor and sacrifice. Aside from an annoying and unnecessary typography stunt, this book is pitch-perfect.
 Fires of Our Own Choosing, by Eugene Cross
Unlike Sparks and Fountain, I had did not discover Eugene Cross until his book came out -an obvious oversight on my part. I heard him read half of a story from “Fires” at a reading in DC and immediately bought the book. The collection, largely set in and around Erie, Pennsylvania, chronicling disasters in the lives of Cross’ working-class characters, is a combination of Ron Rash and Bonnie Jo Campbell. Thanks to Cross’ experiments with different forms and points of view, this collection never comes off as repetitive even as he mines the similar themes in each story. I can’t wait to see what this writer has in store for us next. Read my full review here.
By Eric Markowsky, on December 14th, 2012 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their favorite books from the past 12 months and beyond. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009, 2010, and 2011 while you're at it.]
2012 involved a lot of moving around for me, which meant I had a chance to do a lot of reading on buses, trains, and planes, but also that I lost track of what I’d read pretty easily. Looking back at my year in books turned out to be a great pleasure for me, a scavenger hunt through my memories looking for prizes I knew I’d like because I’d hidden them there myself. So here it is, my Best Books of 2012, in categories more personal than just simply current.
 Best new book: This is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz
Hands down the best new book I read this year. In my review, I tried to respond to some of the critics who seemed intent on pointing out two things: (1) this isn’t Diaz’s anticipated sci-fi apocalypse novel, and (2) some of these stories have been around for a while. To them, I say: (1) shut up, and (2) who cares? These are great stories, some are new, and all of them are being collected for the first time. All nine story endings are beautiful, so give each one the attention it deserves. Start at the beginning, and don’t spare a sentence just because you might have seen it once before already.
 Best debut: A Partial History of Lost Causes, by Jennifer DuBois
I’m a sucker for books about modern Russian history (Revolution on), and if you can squeeze in some chess and a little desperation, even better. If that’s not your idea of a good time, there are still plenty of reasons to read DuBois’s debut novel. The plot has its hiccups, but the writing is sharp, thoughtful, and charged, and the characters are great, even the minor ones who don’t seem all that important at first–maybe especially the minor ones who don’t seem all that important at first. Everyone in this book has something to say worth hearing, but only some of them get the chance to say it. The least we can do is try to listen. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 12th, 2012 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their favorite books from the past 12 months---and we let a few older ones slip in, too. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009, 2010, and 2011 while you're at it.]
This was an up-and-down year for me. Almost every new book by one of my favorite authors wound up disappointing, but at least one delivered a rousing success, and I found a few new names to put on my watch list. Here we go:
Best Books
 Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
Flynn’s third book was the best novel I read this year—an original mystery that delivered the twists and turns of an intricate plot, and didn’t sacrifice prose or characterization.
Her previous novel, Dark Places, made my 2009 Best Books list. It was similarly excellent, though completely dissimilar in every other way. Different characters, an entirely different setup and plot and structure.
I think the mystery genre can learn a lot from Flynn: books should be written carefully, not coughed out every six months; characters don’t need to be endlessly serialized; and character work should be prized as highly as plot mechanics. Hopefully Flynn’s wild success this year will prompt some changes from other big-name authors. But I’m not holding my breath.
 Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
The winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction was also my favorite nonfiction book of the year—and possibly the best nonfiction I’ve ever read. Boo chronicles life in a Mumbai slum, and after spending three years there, she gets into her subjects’ heads to such a degree that it feels like a novel.
This is a phenomenal piece of nonfiction, and also manages to slide in one of the best uses of ebook technology I’ve yet seen: the “deluxe” ebook edition comes with videos of the slums and people Boo writes about, providing a mind-blowing reminder that they and their incredible stories are all real. …
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