The Gold Bug Variations
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Narrated by:
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Rachel Botchan
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Andrew Garman
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By:
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Richard Powers
About this listen
A national best-seller, voted by Time as the number-one novel of 1991, selected as one of the "Best Books of 1991" by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award - a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.
Stuart Ressler, an up-and-coming molecular biologist, finds his career sidetracked by the turmoil of the '60s, and a young couple of the 1980s tries to discover why the biologist abandoned his scientific pursuits.
The Gold Bug Variations is a double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of 25 years.
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A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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And There Was Light
- The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
- By: Jacques Lusseyran
- Narrated by: Andre Gregory
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Abridged
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When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.
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One of the three most important books in my life
- By William R. Stevenson on 12-12-15
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Radio Free Albemuth
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings, Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.
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The Pistol to the Head
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Philip K. Dick
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Myra Breckinridge
- A Novel (Myra and Myron, Book 1)
- By: Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia - introduction
- Narrated by: Michelle Hendley, Camille Paglia
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess." So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees. Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent, Myra's moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.
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Well performed
- By Kenny D on 06-08-19
By: Gore Vidal, and others
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Flashforward
- By: Robert J. Sawyer
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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A scientific experiment begins, and as the button is pressed, the unexpected occurs: everyone in the world goes to sleep for a few moments while everyone's consciousness is catapulted more than twenty years into the future. At the end of those moments, when the world reawakens, all human life is transformed by foreknowledge.
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How would you digest the fruits of knowledge??
- By Phelix_da_Kat on 07-23-08
By: Robert J. Sawyer
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Fury
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Salman Rushdie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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surprisingly good
- By David on 11-21-07
By: Salman Rushdie
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Stand on Zanzibar
- By: John Brunner, Bruce Sterling - foreword
- Narrated by: Erik Bergmann
- Length: 21 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically - it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. Society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers and mass-marketed psychedelic drugs.
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perfect audio experience
- By Darryl on 03-24-14
By: John Brunner, and others
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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Generosity
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In Orfeo, Powers tells the story of a man journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present. Composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab - the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns - has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive. As an Internet-fueled hysteria erupts, Els - the "Bioterrorist Bach" - pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey.
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The Lost Chord
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On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being.
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Too much time for a boring story
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Prisoner's Dilemma
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Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and with his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that's in it. A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner's Dilemma is a story of the power of invalid experience.
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DEEP AS THE FOREST
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Operation Wandering Soul
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Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amid the nightmarish disease and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for a National Book Award. Tired and overworked, surgical resident Richard Kraft finds his protective shell shattered when, along with his physiotherapist, he begins to view the children's ward of the hospital. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape.
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Poor performance
- By Amazon Customer on 03-16-24
By: Richard Powers
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Bewilderment
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Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son, Robin, is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos.
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Not Usually a Richard Powers Fan
- By Billy on 09-28-21
By: Richard Powers
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The Overstory
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- Unabridged
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The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
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eye opening
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Playground
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Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
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The descriptions of undersea life were vivid and captivating.
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By: Richard Powers
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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
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Salman Rushdie is widely considered one of a handful of truly great living writers. The internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author's storytelling shines in this epic love story, a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus.
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Okay, Salmon, We get that you're a genious already
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Claire Keegan continues her outstanding work with this new collection of quietly wrenching stories of despair and desire in modern-day Ireland. A writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll's old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder whose ulterior motives emerge as the night progresses. A priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage—and battles his memories of a love affair that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life. And a man seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle as he mourns both his empty life and his lost love.
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Just Superb.
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Music and Mind
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A compelling and growing body of research has shown music and arts therapies to be effective tools for addressing a widening array of conditions, from providing pain relief and alleviating anxiety and depression to regaining speech after stroke or traumatic brain injury, and improving mobility for people with disorders that include Parkinson’s disease and MS.
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Sound Matters
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The Sentence
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Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention", must solve the mystery of this haunting.
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Addictive and surprising
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Nightfall and Other Stories
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A collection of 20 classic short stories by Isaac Asimov, author of the Foundation series, featuring the definitive and only in-print version of “Nightfall”.
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Happily surprised
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By: Isaac Asimov
What listeners say about The Gold Bug Variations
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Leah
- 03-03-20
very cool, but
I thought it was very interesting but where was the editor. seriously, it's fairly absurd.
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- Alexandra d.
- 12-20-22
A librarians interpretation of the human atlas
Incredible story, beautiful celebration of all the variants in species and human life that give this world its magical feeling.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-28-22
Read the Overstory instead.
The writing here is beautiful but prolix. Great themes, leitmotifs, and great writing in many places. Brilliantly synthetic of a variety of subject matters. But, like Atlas Shrugged, needed a strong editor to winnow the chaff. The narration was weirdly problematic especially towards the end. If you listen you’ll see what I mean— Hard to follow sentence flow because of random pauses. All that said, his novel The Overstory, is one of my favorite books of all times. This may be one of the books that I should have read instead of trying to listen to over the course of about 50 jogs.
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- tom
- 03-23-19
Great Expectations, Bigger Disappointments
"The Gold Bug Variations equation is as follows: Powers equals Pynchon minus paranoia, tenderly multiplied in one neat doubling by a self-reflective, ever-expanding infinity of wonder. In the stratosphere of American literature, there isn't a writer today, and not many beyond the pale, who approach the candlepower of this guy. Variations is a Big Bang - a great upward, outward heave of Life - and Richard Powers is first in a class of one, 1991. Think I'm kidding? Read the book." This florid hyperbole is attributed to Bob Shacochis, Author of Easy in the Islands, on the back slipcover of a 3rd hardcover printing of the book.
From page 330, "A message, carefully crafted over time, is altered at random. The text will almost certainly suffer, if it remains intelligible at all. The introduction of noise into a signal is much more likely to garble than improve. Failure is lots more probable than anything else going."
I mention these two items to contextualize my deep disappointment in this reading of a book that presumably was carefully crafted over time (think I'm kidding?) but to my ears and eyes, the text certainly suffered at the hands of the two readers. Following visually the text while listening to the reading I noted a sampling of the emendations uttered, including:
convulsions for convolutions
breast stroke for brush stroke
sub-fraction for sub-farction
pedal for peal
seemingly for seamlessly
they for he
unforeseeable for unforceable
clarity for charity
conversion for conversation
fault for flaut
and that just in the first half of the book. Add to it pronouncing do-loop as doe (long o) loop (just do it, pronounced Homer style?), and You are for Ur, and the rating stars disappear faster than the sun can rise.
Yes, I'm holding the readers to a far higher standard than is my norm, but I hold the book far nearer and dearer to my heart than most. As the book slogs along, however, I wonder where Richard Powers is in this production (lost and gone forever, other than endorsing the royalty cheques is my hypothesis). As for those putatively overlooking the production? I don't care where they were, just sad they weren't in the studio cocking an ear every once in a while to assure a higher degree of fidelity.
And back to the readers. The unfortunately named Rachel Botchan gets the split decision on who botched things more egregiously. I hypothesize that Ms. Botchan vocalized her first reading of the book, not bothering to read ahead so as to flag perilous passages that require subtler phrasing nuances than a 1980s era text to voice synthesis algorithm might come up with. Evidence for this claim: distinct pauses when text crosses page boundaries, and distinct pauses when tough to pronounce or unusual words appear seemingly out of nowhere. Add to this multiple mini flubs that really would have benefited from a Take Two, clear lapses in visual attention (or maybe those are merely a succession of ectopic pregnant pauses?). And, as the book grinds on, out of nowhere accelerations in pace of delivery, as though her seat is delivering electrical shocks if her wpm rate drops below a target value, only to slow it down again, at least until the next goose speeds things up. At the halfway point I had serious misgivings about my ability to hang in to the bitter end.
p 474, almost at the end of Chapter 21, "The smallest tweak of context changes every sentence." Would have been appropriate for Ms Botchan to substitute content for context, but alas, she has been too busy making other errors to choose this poignant one.
p 531. I give up."but held one another hypothetically" is the text, but the reading substitutes hypnotically for hypothetically. Earlier, another pause going from page 530 to 531 and add a hesitation to figure out that nasty word "chaconne." And on page 530, substitution of the hilarious "litigation" when the text reads "ligation" (as in tubal).
I have been ingloriously punked. Buyer beware.
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24 people found this helpful