Writing for the Ear
May 23, 2023 2:14 PM   Subscribe

While a number of audiobooks are narrated by celebrities or by their own authors, the vast majority are read by unknown and unacknowledged literary workers, at once subordinated to the text and responsible for it, unseen but audible. Narrators represent an entirely new role in the literary field, variously performing the functions of author, text, and reader. Like the author, the narrator is the person from whom the text emanates. Given that the material of the audiobook is not the printed page but a recording of a voice, narrators likewise serve as the embodiment of the text itself. And yet, they are also that text’s reader—in many cases, one of its very first readers. from The Work of the Audiobook [LARB; ungated]
posted by chavenet (42 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
There are audiobook readers I like so much that I’ll listen (read?) whatever books they’ve done. It has led me to some books I never would have sought out, but really enjoyed.
posted by Bottlecap at 2:32 PM on May 23, 2023 [10 favorites]


Contrarily, there are readers who call themselves "performers" and so ridiculously overdo it that they overshadow the writing and spoil the experience for me. Maybe it's ego-- they want to be the star and relegate the text, which is the whole reason for the exercise, to the back seat. I don't know. I do know that I have a list of such "performers" and I never, ever purchase any audio product featuring them.
posted by charris5005 at 2:55 PM on May 23, 2023 [7 favorites]


I write for the voice of Will Patton.
posted by dobbs at 3:05 PM on May 23, 2023 [4 favorites]


While a number of audiobooks are narrated by celebrities or by their own authors, the vast majority are read by unknown and unacknowledged literary workers, at once subordinated to the text and responsible for it, unseen but audible.

I've not yet encountered an audiobook in which the reader was "unknown" or "unacknowledged".

Also: They are most definitely paid for their work!
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 3:08 PM on May 23, 2023 [5 favorites]


I have a list of such "performers" and I never, ever purchase any audio product featuring them.

That strikes me as an individual choice, and what constitutes "overdoing" it is a matter of taste. I'm not suggesting your personal preference is wrong, just that I don't think it's universal.

I aspire to being an audiobook narrator, and this article interests me highly.

Commenting on Metafilter has helped me improve my communication skills in the context of reproducing all (or as much/as accurately as possible) of the rich vocal and facial emotions and expressions that are an integral part of a face-to-face conversation using only plain ASCII text as a medium. Interpreting the written word of an author back to an aural context, keeping as close as possible to the author's intent, and making it engaging enough that people will seek out more such audiobooks, is just as challenging. That's true whether or not the author was intending their work to be read or re-enacted (to some degree) out loud to others.

I'd love to hear from other audiobook narrators on Metafilter...
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:09 PM on May 23, 2023 [7 favorites]


I dunno if y'all consider Ray Porter as one of those "performers" - but he's certainly made works like Project Hail Mary pop a bit more. (I've been listening to a ton of audio books recently just because they're easy while I'm cooking, cleaning, etc.)
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:53 PM on May 23, 2023 [4 favorites]


Automated narration, Apple claims, will make “audiobooks more accessible to all” by eliminating some of the “the cost and complexity of production.”

In other words, "so we can crank out halfass shit more quickly and cheaply while paying fewer people." Grrr.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:37 PM on May 23, 2023 [5 favorites]


A good reader can make a huge difference in how enjoyable I find a given audio book.

I don't listen to as many audiobooks (or podcasts) since I stopped having a long commute. My wife, however, listens to lots of audio books, so I listen to bits of a lot of audio books. I keep confusing "Project Hail Mary" and the "Bobiverse" books because they're both read by Ray Porter. Conversely, I found it really weird to hear the audiobook versions of the Murderbot books because the reader sounded much more stereotypically male than I imagined Murderbot's voice.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:38 PM on May 23, 2023 [1 favorite]


I'd love to hear from other audiobook narrators on Metafilter...

*pulls up a chair*

Hiya. My experience is fairly extensive, but atypical in that I did it on a volunteer basis, and while certain elements of that are not necessarily germane to some of the points in the article, it's still relevant I think.

I spent around eight years as an audiobook narrator for around two to four hours a week, sometimes a bit more if I had the time (like that summer I got laid off from a job) and/or there was a time-sensitive narration project on the go.

I will leave to the listeners of my work whether or not my voice was to their liking (although my audition feedback did include the phrase "Reader has a pleasant voice"). Whether that held up under field conditions is for the end listener to judge.

Up front, I had to audition. My audition recording was reviewed by a panel, IIRC, and there was quite a bit of training involved before you were allowed to fly solo, and even then you were almost always working with a volunteer who was the recording tech, and you were cross-trained to do that as well. Some time-sensitive, on-demand projects could be "self-monitored/produced," but not having someone else monitoring your recording makes the work harder, and just like good writers know they need editors, good narrators need producers. I also did this during a period where we were shifting from reel-to-reel analog recordings to fully digital ones, with some "hybrid" stuff happening to accommodate a full cut-over to digital for in-flight recording projects.

Once upon a time, publishers would pore over their catalogs, choosing only a select few titles to produce as audiobooks, a format that tended to account for about 10 percent of a book’s sales. These days, when an audiobook can make up anywhere from one to 50 percent of a book’s sales, publishers cover the spread by producing far more titles.

Commercial viability is a net good for the sheer selection (and currency of titles) it offers for people with a print disability.

The books I worked on (either as a narrator or as the recording tech on the other side of the glass, which was the other part of the job) were produced under an exemption in the Canadian Copyright Act for alternate format production, and could not be sold on a for-profit basis, so this was a different scenario than recording them for a for-profit publisher (i.e., I freely volunteered to do it, and our work was not being sold at all, much less for someone else's profit). Not to mention that at the time we recorded titles for which there was literally no audio version anywhere, commercially-produced or otherwise. The available catalogue of these titles at that time now pales in comparison to what's available commercially.

That strikes me as an individual choice, and what constitutes "overdoing" it is a matter of taste. I'm not suggesting your personal preference is wrong, just that I don't think it's universal.

Yeah, the way we were trained was that we weren't giving a "performance." I mean, I would use some emphasis where warranted and logical in works of fiction where something was clearly interrogatory or exclamatory. But we were discouraged from doing "characters," simply because we were volunteers from a variety of backgrounds. There were a few actors I volunteered alongside, and they could pull it off a bit more of a "dramatic" reading than a schlub like me, but even then they were actively discouraged from overdoing it. In non-fiction, especially in the realm of textbooks? No way.

Ultimately, if either the narrator's voice or the way they handle the material is off-putting, that's going to kill the experience of the book for you in ways the author sure didn't intend.

Even as the audiobook market booms, changing the way that books are read, and even as some novelists are writing more and more with a narrator’s voice in their ear, the work of the already precarious narrator is increasingly in jeopardy. In January, Apple Books discreetly rolled out their AI narrator function. Automated narration, Apple claims, will make “audiobooks more accessible to all” by eliminating some of the “the cost and complexity of production.” Despite the insistence that “Apple Books remains committed to celebrating and showcasing the magic of human narration,” and their promise to “grow the human-narrated audiobook catalog,” the implication for narrators is clear: they may soon be automated out of existence.

I'm a little more sanguine about this than some might be (and not because I trust Apple, big tech, or capitalism generally), and here's why:

The on-demand work I had to do (i.e., a library client request for something urgent, usually a textbook that had to be banged out) had lower levels of QA for the final recording, which, aside from stumbles reading the text, were usually in the form of re-takes for extraneous noises (you'd be amazed at the sounds from your GI tract that a high-quality condenser mic can pick up in an isolation booth). This was in the interests of time to final and maintaining capacity for recording additional on-demand titles.

I felt like I've typed some of this before, and it seems I prattled on at length in this comment about how this is all a net good.

Ever use the index or table of context in a book? Well, that's something that's changed for the better in the audio realm too.

Romantic notions about the ineffable magic of the human voice (I believe these notions are very valid, btw) means less if you can't get a copy of your textbook at the same time as the people in your class. This is one case where technology fills in a gap in a big way. And the real change here is not "AI" so much as it is better synthetic voices than, say the original Kurzweil reading machine or its descendants (these guys demo what later 90s-era Kurzweil models sound like).

End users being able to switch up voices at will has its place, especially since those artificial voices are no longer restricted to one flavour, i.e., "As read by Stephen Hawking." Hawking kept that voice as a matter of choice even when presented with new options for one because he was very attached to it and felt that it had become his, but the point stands that not everyone wants to listen to a 20-hour book read in such a voice, even if they know they're hearing a synthetic one. There are lots of options out there now.

But it is an interesting question - what happens when writers are consciously thinking about "how will this sound when read aloud" more than they would have, say 25 years ago? I'd tend to imagine that published or about-to-be published authors whose contracts specify a professionally-produced audio version of their book are thinking about this at least a little bit?

The promise of the audiobook is that reading time, leisure time, entertaining time, and edifying story time can all happen anywhere at any time. Whether you are riding the bus to work, doing the dishes, or nodding off to sleep, the hands-free audiobook allows you the freedom to read when you otherwise could not.

That alone is pretty great, IMO, but the piece doesn't make a passing mention of accessibility, which is where they're a critically important development.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:20 PM on May 23, 2023 [23 favorites]


what happens when writers are consciously thinking about “how will this sound when read aloud” more than they would have, say 25 years ago?

English (as most/all languages?) started out completely oral, of course. You can really notice this when reading some of the earlier written works in Old English. But a lot of more modern but pre-audiobook writing has a similar flow - I think maybe some authors hear their words in their head while writing, and others don’t, and this has always been the case?
posted by eviemath at 5:50 PM on May 23, 2023 [2 favorites]


We had some excellent audio tapes (before “books on tape” became “audio books”) of Maurice Sendak stories when I was little, read by Tammy Grimes. People reading to each other has quite a long history even before any sort of recording technologies, though. Think of cigar factory lectores, for example.
posted by eviemath at 6:01 PM on May 23, 2023 [5 favorites]


I'd like to say that former BBC presenter Simon Vance (aka Richard Matthews and Robert Whitfield) is pretty much the ideal book narrator. He performs a book, but doesn't overwhelm it: I think his RNIB book narration experience helps keep him grounded. His 29 CD reading of Bleak House is incredible.
posted by scruss at 6:20 PM on May 23, 2023 [3 favorites]


Wow. I rarely have an experience with audiobooks that is anywhere near what this article is projecting. I listen to many samples, and most times hear nothing that draws me further into the story or makes me feel like the performer has studied the author or the book itself in much depth. They often sound like they're just reading.
I must be too picky. I've enjoyed audiobooks and readers (Moira Quirk reading the Locked Tomb trilogy for instance) but I'm so often turned off by what I hear that I seldom bother these days unless it's a memoir read by the author (Tina Fey or Alexandra Fuller).
Maybe I'm too used to my own internal narrator as I read, but I feel like I'm waaaaay to picky to get the most out of this genre.
Some great suggestions might help -- perhaps some standout performances of exceptional books?
posted by OHenryPacey at 6:20 PM on May 23, 2023 [2 favorites]


A favorite author of mine was languishing in the audiobook department when a known audiobook reader decided to do his books, putting them for up with permission of the author on his own website. When the book publisher decided that audiobooks were popular enough that maybe they'd record this author's books, they ran into the author having already given permission to someone to record, something which wasn't in the original contract as these were quite old books. There ensued quite a bit of fighting between publisher, author, and author's agent to get this reader's performances of the material recognized as official rather than the publisher recording new versions, which the author refused. The publisher refused to carry the reader's recordings for quite a while, but finally relented and they became the de facto versions.

And this reader is the de facto reader for this author, and has I think recorded all of his work now, much of it with support from a major publisher after this fight instead of doing it on his own dime.

It's weird publication audiobook struggle story with, I think, a happy ending.
posted by hippybear at 6:53 PM on May 23, 2023 [3 favorites]


There are audiobook readers I like so much that I’ll listen (read?) whatever books they’ve done.

I love Kevin Free narrating Martha Wells' Murderbot series, but I connect his voice and narration so strongly with Murderbot, that even in an unrelated collection of short stories, I wondered if a character Free was reading might be a secret robot.

Marin Ireland is my "I'll read whatever she's narrating" person. Louise Erdich is the only author who I really enjoy reading her own work. Cassandra Campbell narrates a lot of characters who are flirty, mean, sometimes a little dumb, but I've grown to love her narration.

Audiobooks are much more immersive for me now that I no longer commute by train. I even bought networked speakers for my apartment so I can listen to audiobooks without pausing when I'm going between rooms. What surprised me is that I hate full cast recordings. I want one narrator reading at a time, doing all the voices. That works best with my brain. I don't mind books that have different narrators for characters with their own chapters, but I find it jarring that I hear two versions of the same character's "voice."
posted by gladly at 7:37 PM on May 23, 2023 [7 favorites]


the sole redeeming quality of andy weir's artemis is rosario dawson's reading for the audiobook. it's just a heinlein-sexy-teenage-girl-first-person retread. I'm dumbfounded she didn't just slam the text on the floor snd say. "fuck this."

a truly gifted narrator. she could read the side of can of soup and make it sound dramatic and interesting.

a human. a talented narrator is a true joy.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:38 PM on May 23, 2023 [3 favorites]


And while I know the stories themselves are out of fashion these days, I do think it's a crime that the US didn't have Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter books. Because that was purely like having a favorite uncle reading you bedtime stories.
posted by hippybear at 7:41 PM on May 23, 2023 [2 favorites]


i just downloaded stephen fry doing all the doyle sherlock holmes. it's terrific.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:51 PM on May 23, 2023 [1 favorite]


In other words, "so we can crank out halfass shit more quickly and cheaply while paying fewer people." Grrr
I think this is a very reasonable position but I do think there’s a bit more to it. The library I work for distributes and produces audiobooks, and while people love their favorite narrators to the point that search by narrator is one of the more popular UI features there is a question of timeliness. Some people want to wait for a really good audiobook but others would prefer to get something while it’s popular rather than waiting months.

I wish there was a way to reconcile the two which meant that people would still be paid to make better recordings but the nature of late-stage capitalism definitely makes me think the answer is going to be “faster, same price, we chose for you”.
posted by adamsc at 8:35 PM on May 23, 2023 [4 favorites]


Coming here to add my vote to Kevin R. Free’s narration of the Murderbot series. I particularly love him for creating female voices that don’t sound like pouty, petulant, seductresses. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and I have early-returned too many books I was interested in because the females voices the male narrators default to are some version of petulant / annoyed / critical. Mr. Free does an excellent job of creating unique female voices that convey authority and strength.

If you are a male narrator of an audio book, please please please study the tone and inflection and cadence of real women in real situations - especially effective women in leadership roles.
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:42 PM on May 23, 2023 [2 favorites]


Not a big audiobook listener, as I tend to get frustrated with the pace at which the story is delivered to my consciousness compared to reading print, as well as preferring less intermediation/interpretation between the words and my imagination. However, when my kid was small we always listened to audiobooks when we were driving anywhere, as a way to assuage my parental guilt about the sheer amount of car time that seemed to be necessary. And of all the many we listened to, the greatest audiobook reader performance by far was Tim Curry doing Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. A more perfect pairing of text to voice is hard to imagine. (Lemony Snicket himself (aka Daniel Handler) did two volumes himself, #3 and #4 maybe?, before realizing that he was far less qualified and entertaining than Tim Curry and turning the job back over to him.)
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 8:46 PM on May 23, 2023 [1 favorite]


The guy who reads Pynchon's Against The Day achieves a monumental task, which is creating something like eighty individual characters and shifting narrative tone across a variety of written styles. It's quite remarkable. It's also, I believe, 56 hours long.
posted by hippybear at 8:49 PM on May 23, 2023 [2 favorites]


A dear friend of mine is an award-winning professional audiobook narrator. I've never actually listened to her work, but in real life her voice is so relaxing that it's easy for me to understand why.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:57 PM on May 23, 2023 [1 favorite]


I've somehow ended up listening to exclusively non-fiction (when exercising, travelling, doing chores), and reading exclusively fiction (when relaxing). This is amazing as prior to getting into audiobooks I only read when relaxing and almost never read non-fiction.

I've noticed more and more non-fiction authors doing their own readings in the past 3/4 years; this is a bit of a mixed bag. I do more of my searching for new books by narrator than by author or subject, and this definitely serves to highlight the skill and dedication of professionals, especially when you see their performances of e.g. popular science, biography and history intercut with e.g. Warhammer Black Library novels.

Rob Shapiro is probably the one narrator I would choose above any other; his readings of maths / physics adjacent books by James Gleick and Max Tegmark opened windows in my mind that I'd never have had access to otherwise.

Conversely I've sometimes made the mistake of thinking a subject could carry me through a narrator I wasn't sure about, and it's never worked out. There was one ("The Rise... of... the Dinosaurs") on modern dinosaur science which had a narrator who sounded like he'd just finished recording a 20 part hardboiled series.
posted by protorp at 11:07 PM on May 23, 2023 [3 favorites]


Not a big audiobook listener, as I tend to get frustrated with the pace at which the story is delivered to my consciousness compared to reading print

Audible players allow you to speed up (or slow down) the speed of delivery without affecting the pitch. You can speed it up 1.5x or 2x or whatever you want. When I'm really enjoying a good fiction book, though, I definitely won't speed it up because it would make the experience (or the fictional world) end too soon. I think this is why some customers prefer very long audiobooks.
posted by eye of newt at 12:29 AM on May 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


Jim Dale, the reader of the Harry Potter audiobooks, was loved by all, so he was used for all of the books.

Being an actor doesn't necessarily make for a good reader. I listened to one read by a very famous, Academy award winning actor (I won't name names). It was not a pleasant experience. I don't think I was alone because a couple of years later they came out with the book again but with a different reader.
posted by eye of newt at 12:34 AM on May 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


Some great suggestions might help -- perhaps some standout performances of exceptional books?

Moby-Dick read by Frank Muller (+ anything read by Frank Muller, which is a lot of books!)
Gravity's Rainbow read by George Guidall (which was famously done for-the-blind and extremely hard to find; the samizdat recording I heard of it was really cool, it sounded like it was coming out of an old transistor radio, really hit the GR vibe; I think the current for-sale version has been remastered)
a-and of course
All the main William Gaddis books read by Nick Sullivan. (Sullivan is an extraordinary reader, these books gain so much from his reading that they're almost like new works of art.)
posted by chavenet at 2:26 AM on May 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


Audiobook rights are now a staple of book contracts, changing the terms of negotiation.

Obviously I think authors should get to negotiate their contracts in whatever way is most advantageous to them, and negotiating audiobook rights separately is no different than say movie/tv rights. But it seems like a decent minority of books end up as Audible exclusives, which I hate. It means I'm never going to get it through the library (at least at my library system, as far as I can tell). It means I can't get it from my preferred audiobook vendor or from the publisher. There are a couple of books that I think I'd really like the audiobook version of, but not quite enough to hassle with another audiobook platform (especially Amazon's, but honestly any). /gripe

Anyway, I prefer to listen to some books and prefer to read others off the page myself. It's not a productivity hack for me (I listen to as much music for chores/commuting as I do audiobooks), it's just nice to be told a story sometimes.

Plus one for Marin Ireland's amazing skills as a audiobook narrator. I also like Michael Crouch, who is similarly prolific.

It's always disappointing when you listen to a good narrator and can't find anything else they've done. I have this problem with Stephen Shanahan, who narrates Jane Harper's Aaron Falk series, and Mhaira Morrison, one of the narrators for Dana Schwartz' YA Anatomy duology (series? Not sure if there are more planned).
posted by the primroses were over at 5:12 AM on May 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


I stan wholeheartedly for Simon Vance and Shelley Frasier (Stiff, Pattern Recognition). Also William Hurt did an excellent reading of Hearts in Atlantis.

Conversely one of my favourite books is Gaiman's American Gods. The extended authors cut audiobook is a full cast production. On the whole I would rather have had a single good reader, the fantasy for me being Neil himself.

Finally I once tried to listen to Heart of Darkness as a librivox crowdsourced recording and it was such tough sledding I don't think I finished it. Different readers took different chapters and the transition from an English accent to a German accent to Betty Boersma from the You Pee in Michigan was toooo jarring.
posted by hearthpig at 5:52 AM on May 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


Yeah, Neil Gaiman reads his own work beautifully - you can really tell his understanding of the work informs it. I've also loved Richard Armitage's Regency romance novel work, that guy can do breathless ingenue like nobody's business.

But full-cast productions are a whole different beast, a crossover of audiobooks and audio drama podcasts that delve into old time radio plays, more theatre than audiobook (think Welcome to Nightvale). The Sandman on Audible is the first graphic novel audiobook I've ever listened to, and it's so very true to form that I was able to recall the comic panel by panel. They also let actors play against typecasting in wonderful ways.

More audiobooks: yay. AI audiobooks: missing the point where fiction is concerned. Text to speech has been around for decades and it has yet to stop mangling anything more complicated than simple driving directions.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 6:04 AM on May 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


protorp’s comment reminded me of an experience I had that highlighted the interaction between written and spoken text for nonfiction: the second course in a two-course sequence using the same textbook was taught by one of the textbook authors. Just a straight lecture, but his lectures were, unsurprisingly, perfectly aligned with the book. And also calm, deliberately paced, and clear. So when I went back to read the textbook on my own (even the chapters not from that course), I then read everything in his voice, as it were; and while the textbook itself wasn’t exactly unclear originally, that just pulled everything together to make it perfectly understandable.
posted by eviemath at 6:13 AM on May 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


I just started listening to Kiley Reid's "Such a Fun Age" - very good so far and the reader is excellent.

I don't keep a list of avoid-at-all-costs readers, but I remember really disliking Grady Hendrix's "Final Girl Support Group" in large part because the reader was awful. I couldn't even articulate why - she had a slow pace and emphasized almost every word as if she was reading to children. It was weird.

Kevin R. Free is indeed great on the Murderbot books. But for me, he will always be the sunshiney-but-villainous "Kevin" on Welcome to Night Vale.

I love full-cast audiobooks! Especially when there are multiple narrators -- Lucy Foley's books in particular benefit from multiple readers. There's also a very neat full-cast recording of "Lincoln in the Bardo."

Authors reading their own works is definitely hit-or-miss. Neil Gaiman reading his own short stories is great of course. And I found a rare recording of Douglas Adams reading "The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul," which I loved.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:09 AM on May 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


Speaking of actors and full cast books - the recent Michael Connelly Bosch and Ballard books have been using Titus Welliver to narrate Bosch and Christine Lakin to narrate Ballard. Works surprisingly well. (and honestly at this point Titus Welliver is my head canon Bosch, which is better than where he start as a riff on Batman's Det. Harvey Bullock)
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:05 AM on May 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


There may not be many fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s books here, but he narrates all of the books he’s written and he has a voice for radio.

If you’re not into his pseudo science, then I’d highly recommend the audiobook he did with Paul Simon, Miracle and Wonder. It’s basically an extended interview with lots of clips of Simons’ music in audiobook format.
posted by MewThat at 2:50 PM on May 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


Oh. Oh no. Oh dear no. Don't bring up Paul Simon. I posted an FPP about him recently and it nearly turned into an I/P level of conflict.
posted by hippybear at 2:55 PM on May 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


I go through a lot of audiobooks and most of them are narrated really well. Two negative examples stick out from recent memory:
One is "The Time in Between" by Maria Duenas. The narrator's voice is best described as enervated, and the book is supposed to be about daring-dos during WW2!

The other one is "Is Paris Buring?" by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. It must be a very old recording and the narrator has an exaggerated RP accent that one simply doesn't hear much anymore. The effect of that blithe voice is that of an English twit making fun of the French and all their plight. It was lucky that the book was very engrossing and I eventually made it all the way through (and am glad of it.)

These two audiobooks make me so much more grateful for all the wonderful audiobook narrators out there.
posted by of strange foe at 6:38 PM on May 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


I don't keep a list of avoid-at-all-costs readers, but I remember really disliking Grady Hendrix's "Final Girl Support Group" in large part because the reader was awful. I couldn't even articulate why - she had a slow pace and emphasized almost every word as if she was reading to children. It was weird.

Yes! I felt terrible because the narrator, Adrienne King, was part of the Friday the 13th franchise and had lived through a stalker fan, and it was meant to be a big deal to have her reading the audiobook, but I didn't like her voice.
posted by gladly at 8:10 PM on May 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


Yes! I felt terrible because the narrator, Adrienne King, was part of the Friday the 13th franchise and had lived through a stalker fan, and it was meant to be a big deal to have her reading the audiobook, but I didn't like her voice.

Interesting! I wish I'd known that at the time, but I doubt it would have helped.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:11 AM on May 25, 2023 [1 favorite]


Moby-Dick read by Frank Muller (+ anything read by Frank Muller, which is a lot of books!)

Oh, yes, this is a wonderful rendition. Sadly I did try one or two other Mullers, I think they were Elmore Leonard novels but they didn't click for me.
posted by storybored at 7:37 PM on May 25, 2023 [1 favorite]


And so suddenly there's a Humble Bundle of audiobooks! Here's the link. I have no idea about the readers or the quality, but it seems like a thing people here might appreciate.
posted by hippybear at 8:08 PM on May 27, 2023 [1 favorite]


Juliet Stevenson's reading of Middlemarch is wonderful. Makes a great book greater.
posted by kingless at 1:44 PM on May 28, 2023 [1 favorite]


There's also a very neat full-cast recording of "Lincoln in the Bardo."

Which is pretty dang amazing, except for one detail. The cast is incredible (including Carrie Brownstein! Don Cheadle! Miranda July! Keegan-Michael Key! Julianne Moore! Megan Mullally! Nick Offerman! Susan Sarandon! David Sedaris! Ben Stiller!), but who do they get to read the key part, the character whose existence goes a whole way to explaining how the other characters came to be in the state they are in? Only the author, George Saunders.

Saunders is one of my favourite writers. The character he reads is a complex one, and if anyone understands their motivation, it's Saunders. But compared to the actors, his delivery is flat and dry.
posted by scruss at 5:24 PM on May 29, 2023 [1 favorite]


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