Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Carpet Diem
Subtitle: Or...How to Save the World by Accident
Author: Justin Lee Anderson
Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
Language: English
Release date: 02-14-17
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 30 votes
Genres: Fiction, Humor
Publisher's Summary:
Fifteen years after losing most of his family to a devastating, pudding-related tragedy, Simon Debovar has settled into a life of self-imposed exile from the stinking, selfish morass of humanity. Content that his daily highlights will include hazelnut coffee, a long bath, and the occasional jar of olives, his life is completely upturned by the discovery that his ornate living room carpet is the deciding factor in a bet between God and Satan.
When mysteriously well-timed carpet thieves deprive him of the crucial heirloom, Simon is forced to leave his hermit's existence behind for a world of angels, demons, witches, and immortals.
And then it gets complicated.
Critic Reviews:
"I laughed, I cried, I bought a fireside rug!" (Ian Pattison, creator of Rab C Nesbitt)
Members Reviews:
not bad, but not great
This book is like Douglas Adams trying to wrote like Neil Gaiman. It was a decent book, but fell short in a lot of ways. Unfortunate, really, the potential was totally there.
Enjoyable and light hearted
A merry light reading, although a bit juvenile. some parts could have been written by a raunchy hormone fueled teenager. Very well performed
Enjoyable ride
I quite enjoyed this absurdist comedy. The story is satisfying and the humor will bring a smile to your face. The story circles around a man who has absented himself from society until one day an angel and a demon show up on his door step demanding he pick one to give his living room carpet to and thus decide the fate of the world. After that, the story starts to get strange. This wont be your book of the year, but it is fun.
What the heck did I just read?
Some mild spoilers ahead.
I thought the concept of this book was pretty funny. The writing has a fair bit of humor, too.
The problem is that the plot makes less than no sense whatsoever. Yes, sure, the basic silly plot is fine, with this one object owned by this hapless fellow being the key item in a bet between divinities, but the rest? Absolute and utter nonsense.
The reader is introduced to a cavalcade of bizarrely random characters, random superpowers, random sidequests, and random decisions. Most of the actual meat of the story doesn't actually involve the rug whatsoever -- it's that the main character and his party get sent on a fetch quest where they pick up a whole bunch of randoms on the way, too. It's sort of like a Final Fantasy story, except it makes even less sense.
Okay, though, I love Final Fantasy -- I want to be clear. But let's admit that "hurry, or The Big Bad is going to end the world by the next full moon!....but first let's grind out some levels and farm some gold and help Farmer Dan rid his chicken coop of goblins" is something that should strictly be reserved for RPGs, and doesn't make a very tight novel. The entire story is mostly a completely unrelated and random-sounding side quest.
The characterization is also sort of inconsistent. When the character that seems most developed is the unrepentantly drunk pensioner running around in the body of a 25-year-old, that's not a good sign. Also, the end is a pretty blatant expository round-up in case you missed how clever the rest of the story was.
It's not a bad book. I still listened to the whole thing, and I enjoyed some parts of it. But it did take me a long time to get through, and it isn't even that long.
