Instead of lamenting Audible’s flaws or theorizing about the lack of competition in the audiobook market, I’m going to list a few things that would make the service better:

• Provide a way to “follow” your favorite authors. Currently the only way to find out if your favorite author has a new title available is to go to the Audible site and manually search, which is a gigantic fail. A feature like this would be trivial to implement with Atom or RSS feeds.
• Social Network Integration. It’s unfathomable in today’s world that Audible has no integration with any of the major social networks. If you have a great listening experience, there’s no way to automatically share it on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network. Audible doesn’t even support Shelfari, a social network for book lovers that’s part of its own corporate family. What’s the deal with that? Combined with its dated 90’s style site design, this gives Audible the aura of an uncool, isolated island.
• Listener Choice Awards. How about an award program based on customer votes? It’s hard to believe Audible’s claims about how much it values feedback from its “literate” customers when it doesn’t have a single award or “best of” list not chosen by its own editors (whom we never meet). I can’t be the only one to notice that many of the titles its editors grace with their blessings have customer ratings in the 3’s (out of 5). This we-tell-you-what-to-like approach has always struck me as a little condescending and elitist. It’s especially stark when juxtaposed against Amazon.com (Audible’s parent company) where EVERYTHING is based on customer ratings.
• Fix the My Library feature. Currently each individual part of a single audiobook is listed and counted in your Library like it’s a separate audiobook. This is highly annoying when navigating or managing your library. Please fix this or at least allow customers to collapse the individual parts.
• Offer a Subscription Plan for Commuters. I saved the best (or worse?) for last. I’m fairly certain that people with long commutes are Audible’s biggest customers. The rub is that if your commute is an hour one way, it will take you only a week to finish the typical audiobook. After you spend the one or two credits Audible gives you under its current subscription plans, you’re left with the choice of either waiting a month for your new credit(s) or paying Audible’s outrageous retail prices. This choice, which I face nearly every month, is the thing I dislike most about Audible and will most likely be the reason Audible loses me as a customer. I would be much happier with a plan that offered a special discount for your 2nd or 3rd purchase in a month or a special discount on audiobooks longer than 20 hours for monthly subscribers.

Based on what I’ve read about CEO Jeff Bezos, I’m surprised that Amazon paid a third of a billion dollars to acquire Audible without insisting on any of these things.

A dark, intense character study of a man who offsets many personal acts of valor and selflessness with a few acts of horrifying cruelty. Literal warfare as a metaphor for the main character’s inner turmoil. Big Philosophical Questions about good and evil, the ethics of interfering with less advanced civilizations, finding purpose in a post-scarcity society, and most interesting of all, what it means to be human in an era when machines do everything better than people, including the things we thought made us uniquely human.

Great stuff. I would have given it 5 stars if not for the twist ending. I have nothing against twist endings per se (in fact I love them when they’re well executed), but in this case I felt like it robbed me of a perception that I had spent 468 pages developing.

In any case, the scene with The Chair was the most unsettling thing I’ve ever read. It disturbs me even now.

Though Crichton is best known for Jurassic Park and the television show ER, I personally enjoyed Travels, his nonfiction memoirs, more than any of his fiction. What a life he led. The best chapter was “The Girl Who Seduced Everybody”, which left me laughing out loud, something none of his novels—as good as they were— ever did.

There are three things about Crichton’s writings that have always fascinated me:

First, no one researched their subject matter more thoroughly than Crichton. In fact, he was one of the few novelists whose novels routinely included academic-style research citations on the back pages. After reading a Crichton novel you feel like an expert on the subject. It’s interesting that such material would be so popular.

Second, despite the fact that nearly all of his novels had a storyline that was firmly science fiction, Crichton never suffered the professional misfortune of being labeled a science fiction author. The commercial success of his books meant they were considered “suspense thrillers that contained science fiction elements.” I’ve always found that mildly preposterous given his storylines included aliens (Sphere), time travel (Timeline), sentient robots (Prey), talking apes who live in ancient lost cities (Congo) and, most famous of all, genetically engineered dinosaurs (Jurassic Park). He obviously had a smart agent.

Some critics have argued that because so many of Crichton’s early books were made into movies, his later works became more like film scripts than novels. I have to say I mostly agree with this criticism, especially in the case of Timeline (which I loved anyway). More precisely my opinion is that many of his later works were undeniably written in a manner that made them amenable to screen adaptations. But hey, when you sell the movie rights to your books before you even write them (as Crichton did with every book after Jurassic Park), that tends to happen. The same criticism can be made of Tom Clancy and John Grisham.

Crichton, a medical doctor with multiple Harvard degrees, was enormously intelligent. Though he generally didn’t base characters on himself, all of his books except Disclosure featured a character that was extraordinarily knowledgeable. And that brings me to the third thing I admire about Crichton: Unlike other New York Times chart-toppers, he wrote novels for the thinking person.

His talent will be missed.

First the Easy Rawlins Series ends, now Michael Crichton is gone. The life of my mind has two gaping voids.

Although I really, really hate to see the series come to an end, it’s high time that it does. No matter how enthralling and well-written, any mystery series centered on the detective capers of a middle-aged grandfather (which is what Easy has become by the last book) is bound to become a tough sell sooner or later. I’m sure Mosley was more cognizant of that than anyone, which is why Blonde Faith ended with such finality.

Each book in the series has a color in its title. I had read four of the books and hadn’t consciously noticed this pattern until it came up in a magazine article I read.

A Little Yellow Dog was my favorite book in the series, followed closely by Cinnamon Kiss.

Jackson Blue was my favorite secondary character. Every time his character made an appearance I was reminded that a beautiful mind and an ugly soul can coexist in one person.

I understand about Easy and Bonnie Shay, I do.

Mosley’s depictions of postwar Los Angeles are so vivid and historically accurate it’s like time-traveling.

I discovered the series when a good friend of mine insisted I read Black Betty. I loved it just like she said I would and can’t thank her enough for the introduction.

Most people don’t know that Walter Mosley is bi-racial (his father is black and his mother is Jewish.) I only mention that fact at all to say that Mosley’s striking ability—and choice—to chronicle the joys and pains of the black experience in America is even more interesting than I originally thought.

Of the several themes that Mosley weaved throughout the series, the most fascinating is this: Your good deeds today will not absolve you of the evil you did yesterday. No matter how much Christmas Black loves and cares for Easter Dawn, they can’t ever be a normal family because of what he once did on the other side of the world. No matter how grand Jewelle’s real estate empire becomes, she can’t forget what she did to Mofass to get it started. No matter how much of a safe haven Laselle Latour’s female-only boarding house provides for women in L.A., it will never make up for the bordello that she ran back in Houston.

The only character who was exempt from the gravity of this moral black hole was Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, the diminutive killer who was Easy’s right-hand man. Mouse would shoot you through the eye for breakfast and go dancing for dinner. As Easy discovered on many occasions, having Mouse as a best friend was like keeping a full-grown tiger for a pet.

I will miss having another Easy Rawlins mystery to look forward to. Mosley is among the best writers of his generation and the life of my mind has been enriched by these stories. One of my favorite passages from the series is this:

Proof is a funny thing. For policeman and for lawyers it depends on tangible evidence: fingerprints, eyewitnesses, irrefutable logic, or self-incrimination. But for me evidence is like morning mist over a complex terrain. You see the landscape and then it’s gone.

And then it’s gone.