Yes, she should be fired because the sound of the voice is so much more important than what she’s saying. :rolleyes:
You know, if you read the book yourself, it can have any voice you want running in your head.
I actually love her voice. Fits perfectly.
I concluded long ago that having a good voice is not a requirement for working on radio anymore, or at least where I live. I’m not talking about essayists presenting their own work (although an annoying voice will, for me, take away from the message) but just the people doing the daily shows.
Yeah, I thought the whole notion of a “voice for radio” went out decades ago.
Me too, and when I read her books I hear her voice.
It can’t be that bad a voice, she gets voiceover work, including in a Pixar movie.
I like her voice and thought she did a great job in The Incredibles. I can see how it might grate on people when listening to her reading a long book, though.
Personally, I have a voice for silent movies and a face for radio.
It’s not appreciated today. It might even be considered a little vain. Instead you have voices geared to various kinds of programming. Sort of blandly assertive for AM news, excitable for sports talk, and vaguely geekish for public radio. And there’s a spectrum within that, too.
I’m tempted to think that if someone with an old school, articulated delivery, or even just a deeper male voice, sent TAL an audition file today, they’d be asked to work on their reading. The blasé, light-textured, vaguely northeastern monotone has become identified with that style of radio to a degree no one would probably admit to.
I have problems with her as a writer on this one also, but if you’re going to be paid to narrate then yes, you should have a voice that isn’t grating and tell your jokes in a style that doesn’t sound like the Bar Mitzvah Boy character from Weekend Update. Narration is an art.
I tried that and it helped, but I kept running into other cars.
Her narration was interrupted by welcome respites from John Slattery, Alexis Denisov, Nick Offerman, and others reading excerpts from the letters of historical figures.
It’s her book, though. It’s not as if she was hired as a narrator directly. It’s just the writer reading her own book. She’s unlikely to fire herself.
I’ll admit that her voice perplexes me in a way that no one else’s does. What voice is she subconsciously modeling? I realize it’s an extreme version of the type of accent that Kristen Schaal has, but why would she not also pick up on the moderating factors?
I understand people who have higher pitched “cutesy” voices. They picked it up in childhood when people thought it was cute, and maybe even had it reinforced as an adult by those people who find it cutesy. Plus, they likely have a higher pitched voice to begin with that makes the cutesy sound much easier.
But Vowel has a fairly low voice, despite her squeakiness. Where did she pick this up? Is there a place in the U.S. where people regularly talk like her? It doesn’t seem like a mechanical problem, or anything.
She’s from Oklahoma.
It works for her. That book is so personal that hearing someone else’s voice would just sound wrong. I had the audio book of some of Richard Feynman lectures read by a Brit and it was unlistenable.
Yet Legendary Anchorman Bill Kurtis still gets work on NPR. Go figure! 
Interesting points. And as I’ve admitted here before, I’m extremely sensitive to voices, so I really miss the days of “neutral” speech patterns, whereas it sounds like you’re saying that is no longer the norm. Even so, people don’t want articulateness anymore? That makes me sad.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with Sarah Vowell’s voice. It’s different but that’s not the same as bad.
99% Invisible, though, has a response for such complaints (I saw this go around but never confirmed that it is truly something they used):
And yet when it was time to create an audiobook of In Cold Blood, they hired yeoman narrator Scott Brick, and for Breakfast at Tiffany’s Michael C. Hall; never a Truman Capote impressionist like Toby Jones.
Personally, what I find more annoying than anyone’s voice is the use of the term “quirky.” IMHO, when we label something as “quirky” we marginalize it all the same, no matter what our intentions may be, because it still presupposes a “norm.” I don’t think we need to have a “norm” for radio voices. You can like a voice or not, but every voice is equally legitimate.
For which I’m glad. It would be gimmicky to imitate him.
I saw one person try to imitate him in a theater production of Christmas Memory and it was just awful.
I would say there is a “norm” for radio voices, and I would describe Sarah’s voice as “distinctive,” but I think “quirky” fits, too. Like I said, I like it, and I like it for that reason. I feel it fits her personality and style of writing, and I enjoy listening to it.
So is there a Sarah Consonnant out there with the unfortunate tendency to speak as if she had a mouthful of gravel?