Category: Audible

Top (and Bottom) Books Read in 2025

Posted in Audible, Audiobook, Book, Ridley Park, Sci-Fi, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I genuinely loathe top X lists, so let us indulge in some self-loathing. I finished these books in 2026. As you can see, they cross genres, consist of fiction and non-fiction, and don’t even share temporal space. I admit that I’m a diverse reader and, ostensibly, writer. Instead of just the top 5. I’ll shoot for the top and bottom 5 to capture my anti-recommendations. Within categories are alphabetical.

Fiction

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – A slow reveal about identity, but worth the wait.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Classic unreliable narrator.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM (AKA Sam Hughes) – Points for daring to be different and hitting the landing.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – Scottish drugs culture and bonding mates narrative.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – In the league of 1984 and Brave New World, but without the acclaim.

Nonfiction

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher – Explains why most problems are social, not personal or psychological. Follows Erich Fromm’s Sane Society, which I also read in 2025 and liked, but it fell into the ‘lost the trail’ territory at some point, so fell off the list.

Moral Politics by George Lakoff

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis – Explains why Capitalism is already dead on arrival.

NB: Some of the other books had great pieces of content, but failed as books. They may have been better as essays or blog posts. They didn’t have enough material for a full book. The Second Sex had enough for a book, but then poured in enough for two books. She should have quit whilst she was ahead.

Image: Books I read in 2025 on Goodreads.
Full disclosure: I don’t always record my reading on Goodreads, but I try.

Bottom of the Barrel

Crash by J.G. Ballard – Hard no. I also didn’t like High-rise, but it was marginally better, and I didn’t want to count an author twice.

Neuromancer by William Gibson – I don’t tend to like SciFi. This is a classic. Maybe it read differently back in the day. Didn’t age well.

Nexus by Yuval Harari – Drivel. My mates goaded me into reading this. I liked Sapiens. He’s gone downhill since then. He’s a historian, not a futurist.

Outraged by Kurt Gray – Very reductionist view of moral harm, following the footsteps of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – A cautionary tale on why writing a book on LSD may not be a recipe for success.

Honourable Mention

Annihilation by Jeff VernderMeer was also good, but my cutoff was at 5. Sorry, Jeff.

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Written by Ridley Park

Ridley Park

I Return From My Fictional Sabbatical (With Antimemes in Tow)

Posted in Audible, Audiobook, Book, review, Sci-Fi, VideoTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Ridley Park has not been dead, merely sleeping like a hungover deity ignoring its worshippers. As has become my regrettable habit, most of my creative energy has been siphoned into non-fiction projects, leaving the poor world deprived of my fictional offerings and my blog gathering dust like an abandoned cathedral.

But fate – or more accurately, an algorithm – shoved a book into my face with all the subtlety of a street preacher: There Is No Antimemetics Division. Hard science fiction, horror, and something about antimemes. Naturally, I pressed Play Sample instead of behaving like a responsible adult and reading the summary. Antimemetic sounded deliciously unwholesome. Straight down the hatch.

Image: Advert with an author pic for this book.

I’m only into Chapter Two, so don’t expect a full exegesis yet. This is merely a field report from the early trenches.

I bought the Audible version, because audiobooks are the only thing keeping me sane through workouts, where otherwise, one contemplates mortality and the price of groceries. As the sample ran, I learned two things:

  1. Parts of the narrative are redacted.
  2. They did not redact to protect state secrets or Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost.

No – it’s a stylistic device. A textual blackout. Beeps, static, corrupted passages like intercepted voicemail from a doomed expedition. Being partial to experimental prose, I took it as a dare. My brain applauded.

The effect reminded me of Irvine Welsh’s Filth – not in theme, but in the editorial scars, the moth-eaten structure. Welsh, more widely known for Trainspotting, does chaos like astrophysicists do numbers. Obfuscation as aesthetic. Disorder as design. The connection may be superficial, but it’s one worth pocketing.

The title earns its relevance quickly: certain ideas spread like plague; others erase themselves on contact. Antimemes – cognitive black holes. Information that cannot be held without dissolving. A story that fights the mind that reads it.

Hard sci-fi rarely offers such structural mischief. I’m morbidly delighted to see where the horror emerges, when the narrative begins to eat its own memory like a recursive ouroboros.

More to come, once I descend deeper into the antimemetic labyrinth.

And yes – lest anyone call the coroner – I am still writing.

I happened upon this short film of the story whilst seeking a cover image.

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Written by Ridley Park (sort of)

Ridley Park

Why I Create Audiobooks for All My Books

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Audible, Audiobook, Book, ElevenLabs, ElevenLabs, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Propensity, Software, Sustenance, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This isn’t a promotional post. I’ve recently discovered the hidden value of audiobooks—and it has nothing to do with selling them.

Back in 2024, when I released Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, I must have read the manuscript a thousand times. I even recorded an audiobook, using an AI voice from ElevenLabs. At the time, Audible wouldn’t accept AI narration. The rules have since changed. It’s now available—though still not on Audible (and therefore not on Amazon).

I’d hired a few proofreaders and beta readers. They helped. The book improved. And yet, even after all that, I still found typos. Those bastards are insidious.

The real revelation came when I started listening.

Since I’d already created the audiobook, I began proofreading by ear. That’s when it hit me: hearing the story is nothing like reading it. Sentences that looked fine on the page fell flat aloud. So I rewrote passages—not for grammar, but for cadence, clarity, flow.

Then came the second benefit: catching mistakes. Typos. Tense slips. I favour first-person, present-tense, limited point of view—it’s immersive, intimate, synchronised with the protagonist’s thoughts. But sometimes, I slip. Listening helped catch those lapses, especially the subtle ones a skim-reading brain politely ignores.

For Sustenance, the audiobook was an afterthought. I submitted the print files, requested a proof copy, and while I waited, I rendered the audio. When the proof arrived, I listened instead of reading. I found errors. Again. Thanks to that timing, I could fix them before production. Of course, fixing the manuscript meant updating the audiobook. A pain—but worth it.

I hadn’t planned to make an audiobook for Propensity—some of the prose is too stylistic, too internal—but I did anyway, because of what I’d learned from Sustenance. And again, I found too many errors. Maybe I need better proofreaders. Or maybe this is just the fallback system now.

I’ve had Temporal Babel, a novelette, on hold for months. I won’t release it until I do the same: make an audiobook, listen, reconcile with the page.

Lesson learned.

I’ve got several more manuscripts waiting in the wings—some have been loitering there for over a year. Their release has been deprioritised for various reasons, but when they go out, they’ll have audio versions too. Not for the sake of listeners. For me.

Honestly, I should do this for my blog posts as well. But editing on the web is easier. The stakes are lower. Mistakes don’t print themselves in ink.

Barely Audible

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Audible, Audiobook, Awakening, Book, Cover Art, ElevenLabs, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

So this happened. I submitted Hemo Sapiens: Awakening as an audiobook, and it was rejected. The site says that they’ll let me know why in a couple days. My question is: if you rejected it, don’t you immediately know why?

I think I know why, but I can’t ‘fix’ the problem if I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to act on an assumption.

I believe they’ll inform me that I can’t use AI-generated narration. This would be odd because they have a programme in Beta where they provide the service of automatically converting the text of a book to audio. To be honest, it doesn’t sound amazing. It appears that they are using their own Amazon Polly, which I like, but you need to babysit it hard. It is very unlikely to sound good without heavy hand-holding. As it is, I hand-held my ElevenLabs AI to make the outcome sound like a professional human.

Audible offers some voiceover actors, but I didn’t like any of them, and they couldn’t compete with my ElevenLabs voice. I can understand that they don’t want to sell audiobooks that sound like Stephen Hawking, but theirs sound closer to him than mine.

On another note, I had to render and upload square cover art. There was a stated restriction disallowing padding a rectangular cover image with space or colour to make it square. I followed this rule, but this is exactly what they do. They take the cover of the book you’re selling through Amazon, and they pad the left and right margins with filler colour. I may append the rationale they provide once I’ve received it. Until them, my audiobook is on hold.