Old God's Time: A Novel (2023) by Sebastian Barry

Audiobook Review

Old God's Time: A Novel (2023)

by Sebastian Barry

 Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist and playwright known better on the other side of the Atlantic even though many of this books have been set in the New World.  That's how I discovered him, reading his novel from 2016, Days Without End which is about a gay relationship in 19th century frontier America.  The writing was sharp and the characters well observed.  I remember the reading experience fondly. In 2020 I also read the follow-up, A Thousand Moons, which carried forward the story of the same family, this time focusing mostly on their adopted daughter.   What I did not do is go back and read his back catalog, which features eight older novels one of which was a  Costa Prize winner.  Barry is also a perennial on the Booker Prize longlist, but without a win. 

  Barry's latest book, Old God's Time: A Novel, takes us back to Ireland.  Tom Kettle is a retired policeman, decamped to the Irish coast, determined to live out his retirement in a faux-castle.  He is a widower, and his children are city people, with a son in America. His quietude is disturbed when he is visited by two young policemen asking questions about the unsolved murder of a child molesting priest several decades ago.

  Unraveling the past is the concern of Old God's Time and while it takes the form of a detective novel, the contents are straight literary fiction- no tired genre tropes here.   There can be no description of plot points in a review of a book like this because it will spoil the reading/listening experience.

BILLIONS CLUB: Post Malone (10/391)

BILLIONS CLUB

Post Malone (10/391)

149/391 = 38%

  Post Malone is back, and into double digits with White Iverson, which was added to the Billions Club playlist earlier this week.  Like the Imagine Dragons tune I just wrote about, White Iverson is the third song from his 2016 album, Stoney to make it into the Billions Club, and also like that last Imagine Dragons song, there doesn't appear to be a fourth song ready to make the list.  One song has 450 million streams, a few have 300-350 million and the rest are at 200/100 million, meaning this is the last Post Malone tune from this record that will be added to the Billions Club for a minute.

 

Posted 3/5/23

BILLIONS CLUB

Post Malone (9/372)

Total: 20/372- 5%

   So here's a lesson- the top two artists comprise, between them, five percent of the 372 songs that have reached one billion streams on Spotify.   Whereas Ed Sheeran is the top representative of artists whose fans don't listen to many other artists, I think Post Malone's success with billion stream songs represents the fact that he put out the biggest record of the year inside the Spotify era- eight of his nine BILLIONS CLUB tracks were on the original list on July 21st, 2021.  Since that time he's only added one more track,  Goodbyes, with Young Thug, from his 2019 record.  That last track was added to the playlist in July 2022.

   None of the songs on his June 3rd, 2022 record, Twelve Carat Toothache, are even close.  His two top songs from that record BOTH have 473,000,000 plays- which is almost uncanny- that they would BOTH have 473,000,000 plays at the exact same time.  Those numbers suggest that he won't add another song to the BILLIONS CLUB for at least a year and a half if not two years. 

  One principle of the BILLIONS CLUB that seems apparent in the first two artists is that even at the highest level there is a big difference between the stream totals of the hits vs. the album cuts.   It's not like EVERY Ed Sheeran and Post Malone song is over or close to one billion streams- far from it.

   I don't have any personal experience listening to Ed Sheeran beyond what I over here in public spaces where there is piped in music and even then I wouldn't be able to identify a specific song by him if I heard one- only that it "sounds like Ed Sheeran."  With Post Malone, on the other hand, I actually listen to two of these nine songs.  Those are Circles and Sunflower.  Sunflower is his top song with 2.5 billion streams and Circles is close to crossing the two billion play threshold.   Those two songs are undeniable hits and frankly, they might as well be by Ed Sheeran or even Frank Sinatra for that matter in terms of the simple song structure and sentimental lyrics.  Nothing edgy or groundbreaking to see here.

   Post Malone obviously has legions of dedicated fans who have probably listened to his songs thousands of times.  His fans are young, who are the biggest co-hort of Spotify listeners.  And, most importantly, he has emerged DURING the streaming era, whereas Ed Sheeran straddled the streaming era- emerging in 2011 before Spotify really established itself, but quickly coming to dominate the new platform.

    There is a follow up post about whether the songs from his new record make it to a billion.

BILLIONS CLUB: Imagine Dragons (8/391)

BILLIONS CLUB

Imagine Dragons (8/391)

148/391 = 38%

   Another week, another Imagine Dragons tune lands in the Billions Club.  This week it is Whatever it Takes from their 2017 album, Evolve.  Whatever it Takes is the third song from that album to make it to the billions club joining Believer- a two billion streamer and Thunder which is soon to become a two billion streamer.  Fortunately for this blog, that should be the last song from this record to cross a billion streams for the foreseeable future.  The next highest song after Whatever it Takes is only 250 million.

   

Published 4/3/23

BILLIONS CLUB

Imagine Dragons (7/389)

136/389 = 35%

  Ok, we are back to 35% which is where we were with Artic Monkeys before the total list value was updated from 381 to 389.  Imagine Dragons added their seventh cut this week,  Natural, which was the first song off their otherwise forgettable 2018 record, Origins.  The majority of the songs on this record are well under one hundred million streams.  Three songs fall between one and three hundred million streams and Bad Liar has 850 million streams.  I can honestly say I've never heard this song and wouldn't be able to identify it in a line up.   I didn't write this down last time but they are the 20th biggest act in the world on Spotify with 65 million something monthly listeners. Embarassing!

Published 3/24/23

BILLIONS CLUB

Imagine Dragons (6/381)

120/381 = 31%

   One observation I should have on the post yesterday is that- the 15 artists who comprise the first 30 percent of the BILLIONS CLUB, only 9 of them are in the top 15 artists on Spotify.  This suggests that the BILLIONS CLUB takes time to achieve, like years because even if you have the hottest song on the planet you are talking maybe 15 million plays in a week's time which means sustained plays over the course of YEARS not just a year.

   Which brings me to Imagine Dragons- at this point I am simply trying to pick out all the artists who have more than five songs in the BILLIONS CLUB.  This band... of all the acts I've written about up till now this would be the only act I actively dislike.  I can't even Imagine how I'd behave if I ran into a fan and had to talk to them about their fandom.   I even dislike their non-album efforts which have made it to the Billions Club- a song from Suicide Squad, a film I found unwatchable and something from League of Legends, which I understand as a video game for children and incels. Yeah, I just can't even be bothered to come up with something for these guys.

Cold People (2023) by Tom Rob Smith

Audiobook Review

Cold People (2023)

by Tom Rob Smith

   The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Liu Cixin is about as big as you can get in the world of science fiction of fantasy, each of the three volumes won multiple awards in the English speaking science fiction world and Amazon bought the rights for over one billion dollars.  Those books chronicle the long-term demise/survival of the human race at the hands of a cruel and unyielding universe.  I am, of course, a huge fan.

  I'm mentioning this because Cold People, the latest book from strangely named author Tom Rob Smith, reminded me of something cooked up after the author had actually read the Earth's Past trilogy because this book strongly resembles an episode in that trilogy.  Specifically, in the trilogy, the aliens finally arrive on Earth and they order all of humanity to relocate to Australia within a year and refusal to comply will be a death sentence.   This is just one episode an a trilogy that spans millions of years of human time, but it strongly resembles the set up for this book:  Aliens arrive and give all of humanity 30 days to reach Antarctica.  

  There are, of course, significant difference starting with the location of the removal: Antarctica vs Australia.   Also, in the Earth's Past books, the aliens are characters in the books, we know about them and their back story.  In Cold People, there is no contact with the aliens and the removal is often referred to as an intergalactic eviction of humanity for failure to properly care for the planet.

  Smith tells his story in the familiar style of the international thriller- making this book interesting in the sense that is a straight science fiction book TOLD AS an international thriller- Smith shifts between continents and back and forward in time to bring this cast of characters together in Antarctica before the plot is set in motion, namely that the best and brightest of what remains of world science has decided that the only future for humanity is the extreme manipulation of the human genome.

     Like the Earth's Past books, Smith grapples with the question of how much humans can change before they cease to be human, both in terms of the concrete examples of genetically modified creatures with human dna and in terms of the decisions made by humans to obtain those results.  As an expansion of the ideas and themes of the human removal chapters of Earth's Past, Cold People represents an interesting take.  As a stand alone thriller/sci fi I was left with many questions, specifically, about why humanity's best and brightest would jump straight to making "para-humans" and more without trying to modify the genomes of "ordinary humans" first- to be more resistant to cold, for example.

   Anyway, for anyone interested in the subject, Cold People is interesting but it doesn't strike me as an international best seller because it is so unremittingly dark.

  

BILLIONS CLUB: The Chainsmokers (4/389)

BILLIONS CLUB

The Chainsmokers (4/389)

147/389=  38%

(one of the four songs was already counted under the total with Coldplay.)

    The good news is that I found another act with more than three songs in the Billions Club.  The bad news is that the act is The Chainsmokers.  The Chainsmokers make up for their  bland, radio/streaming friendly electronic pop by being super duper annoying in interviews- the interviews they did in the first flush of their breakout era are a stark illustration of the importance of making a good first impression.  I found my way to The Chainsmokers by working my way backwards from the most recently added songs to the Billions Club playlist on Spotify- their track Paris was added in September of 2022, which means that all of the remaining artists who are unprofiled and had tracks added to the Billions Club between September of last year and today either have one or two songs in the Billions Club.  In numerical order, Paris is 94th of the 389 songs