Hear hear! I LOVE Lenny Henry’s rendition of Anansi Boys and recommend it whenever the subject comes up. His voice is distinctive, but the different accents he uses for the characters really bring them to life in my mind’s eye. Wonderful stuff.
The narrators for Terry Pratchett’s audiobooks are pretty good too. Stephen Briggs has done the later ones. I particularly like his narration in the Tiffany Aching series of books.
And Tom Bodett’s reading of his book Williwaw! really gets me for some reason. Even though I know how the story ends, I always get anxious for the kids as the story reaches its climax.
I think the test of a good audiobook is whether you want to listen to it multiple times.
Jim Dale, who reads the American versions of the Harry Potter books and the “Peter and the Starcatcher” books, does a great job on that kind of fantasy-type thing.
George Wilson is great at reading Carl Hiaasen’s books and Tim Dorsey’s Serge Storms novels, all of which are Florida fiction. Those books are great.
I can’t remember who reads Christopher Moore’s books, but they’re done well. If you like absurdist fantasy (you know … normal life with the occasional demon or monster), you’ll love him.
Ron McLarty is great too; he reads some of Richard Russo’s books and has written and narrated his own novel, too.
Douglas Adams does a good job of narrating his own books.
I’ve listened to hundreds of audiobooks so far, often from Audible, and I have to say, the only one that really really REALLY annoyed me was Sarah Vowell reading her book Assassination Vacation, and IIRC most everybody who posted a review on Audible hated her voice too. The book was good, but I curse the person who decided to allow her to narrate her own audiobook. What a high-pitched nasal whine. (To be fair, I eventually got used to it. But for a while I just wanted to poke out my ears.)
Okay, now I’m wondering: does he read them in a British accent, or at least do the voices that way? Why do there need to be separate American and British versions?
Heh. Haven’t heard that one, but I listened to her The Partly-Cloudy Patriot (with music by They Might Be Giants! and Conan O’Brien as Abraham Lincoln!) and, while her voice didn’t bother me that much, it did indeed take a little getting used to—kind of like a whiny Yeardley Smith.
Am I the only one who prefers books on cassette-tape to those on CD? CDs are better if you’re going to put the book on your computer, but tapes are better for the car, or even home listening. The fidelity doesn’t matter, but the tape is more rugged, and when you stop the tape it always picks up where you left off. I’m not happy that my local libraries are buying new audiobooks on CD; it only helps me when I’m ripping it into AAC files to keep, which I’m not supposed to be doing anyway.
He does do the voices in a British accent, IIRC … in fact, I assumed he was British. The reasons there are separate British and American versions is that there actually are separate British and American versions of the books. Stephen Fry does the British audiobooks, and while everybody says he’s good, I listened to the first book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) and in my opinion Jim Dale absolutely blows him out of the water.
Hmmm. It just occurred to me that the other Jim Dale books I’ve heard, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s Peter and the Starcatchers and Peter and the Shadow Thieves, their books about the origins of Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, etc., are also about British characters. Maybe Jim Dale sticks to British young adult fiction. In any case, I really enjoyed those two books too.
Yes, Assassination Vacation featured Conan as Lincoln as well, and a bunch of other famous guys doing voices too (voices of presidents and their assassins). It was a really neat book, but the voice did indeed take getting used to. Your description is totally spot on – exactly the impression I was trying to convey. (I did exaggerate a little … it only took a half-hour or so for me to quit loathing it. But that was one irritating half-hour.)
Incidentally, I listened to Assassination Vacation while walking around at Disneyland last month. (And hey, the second day we were there, when I had my $20 “earplug” Koss headphones from Radio Shack, I could even listen to them ON the rides, which wasn’t possible the first day because my regular headphones didn’t cut out enough noise and the speaking was swamped by ride sounds.) I’ve been meaning to listen to The Partly Cloudy Patriot too, but now I’m thinking maybe I should wait until we go to Disneyland again, just to keep the tradition alive.
Obviously you’ve never listened to many episodes of This American Life. Sarah Vowell was pretty much a fixture there for a long time, and you do get used to her voice after a while. You can even kinda come to like it. Sarah’s smart and funny with a wry sort of sense of humor.
As I’m sure you know, she was the voice of Violet in The Incredibles.
Once I start falling asleep, it doesn’t matter what they’re saying, it’s the sound of their voice. I’ve gone to sleep listening to the director’s commentary on a DVD in German, because I like the sound of the guy’s voice. Who cares what he’s talking about.
I wouldn’t be opposed to CDs, but that’s because I have a DVD player in my bedroom which plays audio CDs. Unfortunately, a couple days ago we had some power outages which seem to have blown out the player. So now I can’t play CDs in my room.
So what I’d want for now is probably stuff I can download to my laptop (Mac Powerbook), transfer to a portable device if I want, or back up to CD or DVD later. I could still go with CDs as long as I can rip them to my laptop, but I’m not into CDs that much anymore for playing purposes, just back up purposes.
Being able to bookmark where I left off would be nice though, but for now I’m not planning on getting a special device for that.
Rats! I’d forgotten that my library has free NetLibrary access for downloadable audiobooks.
I just bought the first two books of King’s Dark Tower series on a semi-whim. This thread compels me to look at NetLibrary. Lo and behold, they (at least, the first four books) are available for download, and are read by Guidal.
I’ll have to keep an eye out and see if NetLibrary begins to offer Guidall’s Dune readings.
I tried them while I was working out. I found that I did not enjoy listening to books nearly as much as reading them. I tried a few different ones, but didn’t find any I really enjoyed.
I wouldn’t mind hearing Dune read to me. That’s one of those books I gave up trying to pronounce some of the words and wouldn’t mind hearing how someone else pronounces them.
They don’t seem to be made on cassettes anymore at all. And that’s consistent with the lack of cassette capability in most recent cars. Gone the way of the 8-track pretty soon, sorry.
Agreed on Sarah Vowell’s voice - but it does add authenticity to very personal books. I’d think she was pretty weird for loving presidential assassinations (and that was a *weird * book, especially on audio) if it weren’t for Stephen Sondheim writing an actual musical about them - and doing it first.
I used to think that too. But a couple times, I’ve had some weird dreams that were unrelated to anything in my life. And when I listened to the audio later in the day, I found that the weird occurrence happened in the audio. I think this is a pretty common thing too. Remember a long time ago, people were selling subliminal tapes that you play while you’re sleeping? At least for me, my brain processes that stuff even when I’m asleep apparently.
Ah, bummer. Library audiobooks are only available in wma format. And I’ve heard that the DRM makes it hard to convert.
So that leaves Audible for paid download. They have a monthly service or you can pay as you go. Simplyaudiobooks also has a similar service, I think. But from what I can tell, the simplyaudiobooks selection is smaller. I’m not sure about that though since I don’t subscribe to that.
I don’t know much (anything) about Apple downloads but there was a thread about audiobooks for the ipod recently.
That’s probably true since it’s already difficult to get cassette players these days. But I’m hoping that cassettes will hold out until CDs get phased out and downloadable takes over (and downloadable improves).
Although some of the publishers are not creating the cassette version anymore, there must be still some lingering demand because in the ad for Brilliance audio in the Oct/Nov 2006 issue of AudioFile magazine, they were advertising that you could call a telephone number to get a cassette version of an audiobook where Brilliance didn’t originally release the cassette version. I don’t know how much it costs to do that since they’re just doing what you could do at home, but if the cost is not different, it could be worth it. Recorded Books generally makes their books available in cassette, at least so far. It’s been the big topic of discussion in AudioFile magazine for about the last year about the predictions for demand in different mediums. I’m interested because I’m a fan of the cassette and hope it doesn’t die out too quickly.
Here’s a link to a column that Stephen King wrote for Entertainment Weekly in defense of audiobooks (the good ones at least), in which he lists his own top 10 favorites:
Sarah’s smart and funny with a wry sort of sense of humor.