Audiobooks &c.

[monti]

(I considered just replying to the reading thread with this, but it seems distinct enough for its own thread.)

I have a job where I can listen to things and 40 hours a week adds up to a lot of audio. I'm not crazy about podcasts so most of this is audiobooks and I have developed Thoughts Upon the Medium, mostly about how important the role of the narrator is. I don't think audio is the lesser way of "reading" a book than visually but it is one that's mediated by a performer. A decent book can be ruined by a bad narrator and a mediocre book made very enjoyable by a good one in a way that doesn't have an equivalent in text.

For example, Thomas B. Costain's series on the Plantagenet dynasty, beginning with The Conquering Family. I read/listen to a lot of history books and this series isn't the kind that would usually click for me: it's a straight dynastic history focused on the lives and deeds of the high nobility, retelling a story already mostly familiar to me. But as soon as I heard the narrator of the first book I knew I'd listen to the whole series:



David Case has the perfect voice for it! And because of that I listened to a whole series of books I would've otherwise given a miss and learned a lot that doesn't make it into the summaries of the period I'm familiar with (especially salacious rumors that boring historians leave out).

Counter-example, I just finished listening to the audio version of a book I'd already read (The Wager by David Grann) and really enjoyed, and I felt like the narration was all wrong for its tone and content. I thought the narrator (acclaimed actor Dion Graham) put too much English (in a baseball way not an accent way) on every word he read. (This seems like a pretty common complaint - he's in "spooky campfire story" mode).

So: here is a thread to discuss audiobooks and their narrators!

One of my long-time favorite narrators is Simon Vance, who I in particular associate with Ruth Downie's Medicus series of ancient Roman murder mysteries. If you listen to audiobooks you've probably heard him before, he's a favorite for classics like Sherlock Holmes. Most important he does voices for the characters and has more than one feminine voice to fall back on.

I want to listen to more audiobooks narrated by women (partly because I am a trans woman who is struggling to adjust her internal and external voice) but sadly they're largely restricted to genres I don't enjoy (esp. romance and its subgenres). Publishers use male narrators by default, especially in history, even for books written by women unless they are explicitly about women. I think most of the histories narrated by women I've listened to were being narrated by the author!

[arbhor]

Oh great, I would love to pick up more audiobooks, thanks for sharing these. Although you noted your distaste for podcasts, I would like to continue to recommend the New Yorker Fiction Podcast which has short stories read and discussed by a different author. You would almost think I get paid give how heartily I recommend it.

For audiobooks, I will share a few that I've enjoyed: Dani Martineck's reading of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Adjoa Andoh's reading of Americanah, and Heather Agyepong's reading of Maame were outstanding. I think you said it best in that the performance is a strong filter on reading the book. Maybe a through line on all these readings is that they are conversational, which supports the character-heavy texts?

I also want to mention Gregory Rabassa's fantastic job reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I was ambivalent about the text so it became a little taunting. I would really like to use audiobooks for texts that I have a tough time getting through otherwise. I thought that plays would be a great idea for listening but I was sorely mistaken in the few I picked out!!

[monti]

Oh great, I would love to pick up more audiobooks, thanks for sharing these. Although you noted your distaste for podcasts, I would like to continue to recommend the New Yorker Fiction Podcast which has short stories read and discussed by a different author. You would almost think I get paid give how heartily I recommend it.

This sounds great, thank you! I say I'm not into podcasts but there's ~4 I listen to often (including Shelved by Genre and Just King Things which are similar). I almost never read short stories so this is just what I need. I'll def check out those audiobooks too, character-heavy and a conversational narrator sound great.

Plays do seem like a tough thing to do purely in audio - radioplays have to use a lot of awkward dialogue and foley work to convey what you immediately see on the stage.

While I've heard some people say an audiobook forces them to ingest each part and word of a text they might otherwise skim portions of I find I can zone out and lose track of it pretty easily.