I really enjoyed this one! It seems like so much of recent fantasy, especially that which gets nominated for stuff, takes itself so seriously and avoids humor and fun. Maybe I've just been grabbing the wrong fiction lately, but that's the way it feels to me. So I loved to see this fun and humorous action-packed story. Was it a dungeon-crawl? Sure, but it was an interesting dungeon, not just a LotR clone. Good stuff.
I definitely did think the whole idea was very similar to Pratchett's L-Space, but at the same time I don't believe I've ever read a Discworld story where L-Space was the primary setting or where the library itself is a major antagonist. So I didn't see it as covering too-familiar ground, but rather exploring some aspects of a cool idea that Pratchett hadn't ever focused on (at least not in the books that I've read).
The Library also reminded me in many ways of the Labyrinth in Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, although this was built as a book repository rather than a prison it behaved rather similarly.
And I really enjoyed the full-cast recording. I know those are a hell of a lot of work to put together properly, and especially when you're committed to such a regular production cycle, that can be hard to do. One of the reasons I really like the Dunesteef podcast is because of their full cast recordings. So it was great to see this one. Great story to choose for it too with enough fun characters to spread the love. Each time a new voice popped up, I got excited all over again--Wilson Fowlie and MK Hobson as the experienced librarians, and of course DKT would be the student who goes to the dark side.
The resolution with the vocabuvores was a good idea, one that I hadn't seen coming. Once he got started feeding it I was wondering if he would overfeed and cause it to bloat up like an engorged tick and make it pop from all the sudden ingestion. Good stuff!
Anyway I'm probably the only one who after listening spent time considering that this trap actually invites people into it by not telling others what happened. The sheer fact that they keep why certain people die in this test a secret ensures that young minds will assume they were the first to think of it, that is at the very least questionably moral..
I think that was precisely the idea, and if that trap works, they've done a service for all of society! If they are teaching students who are very high on ambition and skill and very low on scruples, it is for the safety of the whole society to find these people at some point. In other worlds, people who have turned to the dark side (like Anakin Skywalker or Tom Riddle) have more opportunity to blend into the society as adults and alter things until they have an opportunity to seize real power. This society is self-aware enough to realize that these sorts of people will inevitably come through the system, and it has a method to catch them before taking over the world.