asterroc | Entries tagged with audiobooks

Dear Librivox,

If a volunteer reader refers to it as "Libraryvox," chances are she's not going to do any better reading the rest of Frankenstein.

No loves,

Me

----

Dear Librivox Volunteer Readers,

If you can't read through an entire chapter without stumbling, use an editor. If you can't use an editor, or if you can't read through an entire sentence without stumbling, read to children at a local library instead reading to discriminating adults via Librivox.

No Loves,

Me

(P.S. I understand that dyslexia is a real disability. That doesn't mean that I want to listen to the product of your dyslexia rather than listening to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.)

seekingferret will be interested to know that, as predicted, I don't actually much mind "Sense and Sensibility" (that is, the writing style) in audiobook format. I'm on Chapter 9 right now, and while I will admit that the first two chapters with their plethora of characters were a bit confusing, but when I've done Jane Austen books in the past I found them ridiculously dry and boring. While some of the change may come from increasing maturity on my part, I really do think most of the difference is the audiobook format. If an audiobook is slightly dry, I can tune out and listen with half an ear, doing something else like washing dishes or knitting, and come back in when it gets more interesting.

This particular production (the male Libravox narrator) leaves a bit to be desired, in that it's distributed as a podcast (so my iPod stops at the end of each installation, which is a chapter, around every 10-15 minutes), each "episode" starts with a 30-second boilerplate, and the narrator's voice is relatively toneless, but it is not bad - in fact I would call it a couple small steps above tolerable.

So, I don't much mind the writing style (though I probably would not choose a repeat of this author, I can definitely get through this book), but I have to say the content is somewhat boring. It's a pre-women's lib. soap opera. Maybe it'll get better, we'll see.

I think I have well and buried my fear that I was indiscriminating in my audiobook tastes. I'm currently listening to "Flight" by Vanna Bonta, and I find it to be insipid New Age drivel, splattered with generous helpings of anti-intellectualism and misinformation about modern psychotherapy. I do think I am *more* accepting in audiobooks than in print - if it were a print book I'd probably be putting it down about now (~2/3 of the way through it), but I'm not doing so b/c it's easy to listen to while driving so I don't feel I'm wasting time I could be spending doing something else. The flaws are entirely in the content of the book, not editorial decisions (it's unabridged) or anything else that Audible might have control over, so it's not worth a complaint, just worth noting for my own interest. I will admit that when I selected it I had minor doubts, but it also sounded very intriguing (the "hook" is that the book is about a sci-fi author whose story comes to life), but in the end it ended up more contrived than innovative. Oh well.

My next questionable download: "Left Behind" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. However, I'm planning to listen to all of Handel's Messiah on my drive down to NYC first, so I may not even have to listen to "Flight" again before I get there, let alone starting on this new one.

Current Music: Orchestra, New York - Handel: Messiah, HWV 56 - Part 1/Sc. 2: #7 Chorus | Powered by Last.fm

I ended up going with an ~~Audibile.com~~ Audible.com membership, since for the first three months it ends up being $8 per audiobook, and something like $15 afterwards (audiobooks are usually $30-$60). So for my next book I'm now deciding between "Seventh Son" by Orson Scott Card (Sci/Fan), and "The Planets" by Dava Sobel (she's usually a science historian, but this one has dashes of personal stories and philosophy and other strange things).

I may have read Seventh Son, or other books in the series, but I forget, and I don't think I did do this one, so I want to start (restart?) the series from the beginning. I like other Card, though his politicky ones I like less. I've never read non-Sci/Fan audiobooks before, and this one of Sobel's is supposed to be unusual for her, but I liked "Longitude" and loved "Galileo's Daughter."

Which do you think I should get next?

Any suggestions on what audiobooks I should look for next? Or if you don't know audiobooks as much as any ol' books, recommend one there too. I prefer sci/fan, especially ones that play with the border between the Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Hard science without good characters and plot (like Gregory Benford) drives me insane, but speculative fiction where some new scientific breakthrough drives the characters and story (like Larry Niven) is awesome. I prefer adult to young adult, but I don't mind young adult. I don't mind serieses just so long as there are fewer sequals than letters in the author's name.

I just finished the audiobook of The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. I wanted to read it for a while after

sclerotic_rings and others told me to, but never got around to it. Then I saw they're making a movie of it with Nicle Kidman as Ms. Coulter. So when I saw an audiobook of it at a B&N, I grabbed it up. It's a short one, only 9 CDs total, unabridged, and it's narrated by the author with a cast doing the characters, which is unusual but interesting. It's definitely a young adult work, but there are elements of particle physics and ideas from quantum mechanics that I was shocked and delighted to find in such a book. It's worth reading.

And then it ended. At only 9 CDs and a 1:15 commute, that's around a week to finish the book.

So T$ reminded me of Project Gutenberg - a project to make all public domain literature freely available on the web. There are two sections or lists that I will find useful in the future and therefore wish to draw your attention to: the list of all Sci-Fi, and the lists of all audio works (broken down into sub-categories of human read and computer read).

I've also been wanting to read Beowulf, so that's currently downloading from Gutenberg while The Subtle Knife (sequel to the Golden Compass) is also dowloading via iTunes. Hooray for more bandwidth hogging! ^_^ Next task: burn as mp3's to CDs to play in my car.

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2	3	4	5	6	7	8
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this is not a journal title

hyuk

Entries tagged with audiobooks

You get what you pay for, Librivox edition

Sense and Sensibility started

More audiobooks

Audiobooks!

Book / Audiobook Recommendations?

The Golden Compass, Project Gutenberg

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April 2017

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