Yeah – I have a copy of this on cassette, too. The package says “In 3D Sound”, because it was in that very deliberate stereo that gave you a sense of being surrounded by the action. Just what you want with something like “The Mist”
I was going to say exactly that. Also, IIRC, he read the middle part (the dorm card game) of Hearts in Atlantis and I thought it was just about perfect.
Maybe I am being a bit too harsh in my judgement since others don’t seem to be bothered by it, and some seem to enjoy it. The book I listened to previous to Desperation was The Tommyknockers and it was read by Edward Herrmann. He did an amazing job with the voices, accents, inflections, everything really.
I don’t want to say that I’ll lower my standards, but I’ll try to lighten up and be more open to his interpretation.
Yeah, I don’t think he has the best voice for audio books, but the award for worst narrating voice that I’ve heard goes to Andrew Solomon. I got the audio book Far from the Tree, and I really, really liked the book, but his voice was so horrible that I considered abandoning the book after only about 20 minutes, just because I didn’t know if I could keep listening to it.
And as someone else mentioned upthread, Neil Gaiman is a writer who reads his books well.
You read The Tommyknockers, you’ve already lowered your standards! 
King is excellent, IMO, on Bag of Bones, one of his actually scary books.
I’ve said this about King before and I’ll say it again: When he gets it right, nobody does it better. When he gets it wrong, nobody does it worse.
I’m willing to put up with The Tommyknockers in exchange for The Green Mile.
That’s how I feel about Cujo. The good ones make you wonder if the bad ones are on you.
Here’s silent film of Mark Twain . Sorry that there’s no sound.
Meteor shit!
The real shame when it comes to audiobooks of King’s works is that several were read by Frank Muller, who was really good at narration, and he had a terrible motorcycle accident that left him in terrible shape until he died six years later.
Other interesting recordings I’ve heard was Philip Pullman plus a full cast doing His Dark Materials, Simon Vance and Patrick Tull trading off books in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, a terrible narration by Anna Fields of some of Catherine Asaro’s work (she tried doing this low-pitched thing for male characters that just didn’t work), and Patrick Stewart reading C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. Most of the audiobooks of Orson Scott Card’s various Ender-related works use multiple narrators or a full cast as well.
My parents have Tolkien reading/singing his work on vinyl. I’ve never heard it, as we didn’t have a record player I was allowed to use as a kid and I’m not sure I trust the the needle on the USB-connected one I have now to play anything potentially delicate. Heck, I bought the player on a whim new-in-box at a garage sale years ago and have yet to even open it.
I like when the author reads the book mainly because they tend to know how to pronounce the things they wrote about. I was listening to a James Bond audiobook and for some reason the narrator kept pronouncing his codename as “Oh Oh Seven” instead of “Double-Oh Seven”. Anyone even remotely familiar with James Bond would know to pronounce it “Double Oh Seven” as Ian Fleming himself pronounced it “Double Oh Seven”.
Why does he even bother? I mean, he already knows how they end.
15 years ago I wrote an Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic that was 30 chapters long and I basically forgot all of it until I reread it about a year ago. The only thing I really remembered was the ending to it.
Well, at least he’s handsome.
To keep continuity in the sequels?
I can’t stand listening to King reading his own books. It’s not the nasal tone that bothers me, though–it’s all the mouth noises. He sounds so…wet when he reads. Smacking and swallowing and…ew. At least he did in Bag of Bones, which I managed to get through but it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
I love SK’s books, btw. I’ve been a fan since grade school. He just needs a real narrator.