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It is an absolute crime that Terry Pratchett's Discworld books haven't gotten more love here. Audible carries what I believe is the complete collection, and the narration is almost uniformly superb. Night Watch and Small Gods are particularly well-done. I'm about 75% of the way through Lev Grossman's The Magicians on audio, and I cannot imagine experiencing this story any other way. The narrator perfectly evokes Quentin's state of mind and makes you feel with him, turning what would, on paper, feel like whiny teenage angst into the emotional equivalent of sucking chest wounds for the listener. A superb reading. Peter Watts' Blindsight is not an easy listen, but it's worth it. This is one of the best hard sci-fi novels - and probably one of the best novels period - in years, but it is dense and twisting, almost hallucinatory in places, and it would unquestionably be easier to grok if it were read rather than listened to. That said, the narration is fantastic, and given that it's a book you'll want to read at least twice, I can recommend the audio version without hesitation. I'm still up in the air on whether it's best to listen to it before reading it or read it before listening to it, but it's worth your time either way.
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Nov 7, 2009 19:58
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Regarding Neuromancer, if you're a fan of the book you owe it to yourself to hear Gibson read the abridged version at least once. Yes, abridgments are abominations, yes you should read or listen to the full version first, but Gibson's faint drawl and unusual cadence are absolutely perfect accompaniments to the book. Hell, even the abridgment adds a certain disjointed, psychedelic quality that actually works.
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Feb 10, 2010 21:28
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The degree to which you enjoy His Dark Materials past the first book depends on how enthused you are at reading Pullman's response to Christian fantasy like Chronicles of Narnia. Where the first book touched on religion here and there, books two and three go at it with both barrels. Pullman is an outspoken, unapologetic atheist with an axe to grind against organized religion which he expresses in his books, but he's also a pretty good writer of YA fiction. Personally, I enjoyed the entire series on audio. They're worth the price of admission for the fantastic production values alone.
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Mar 4, 2010 07:17
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PBCrunch posted:Brick seems like the wrong reader for that story. Stephenson's books cry out for a nerdy smartass reader like William Dufris (who read the audiobook version of Anathem). I recently began Anathem in print form, and the idea of trying to absorb that book on audio without being able to reference the appendix constantly is mind-boggling. Recommendation: Audible's Modern Scholar series is wonderful stuff, especially the lectures by Professor Michael D. C. Drout. I've burned through his series on the Anglo-Saxon World and the History of Science Fiction in short order, and they were both entertaining and informative from start to finish. It's like taking a weekend college course taught by a very good professor.
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Mar 20, 2010 18:08
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colas posted:Thanks, I've got Haunted, my fav. is the nightmare box, actually. I'll def. check out Gaiman, Ananzi Boys was a great audiobook. We're going off on a tangent now, but if you enjoyed Anansi Boys then you're pretty much obligated to check out Gaiman's American Gods. That's where his interpretation of the Anansi character originated, and it's a great book besides. Well done on audio, too - most of Gaiman's work tends to do well when read aloud. The Graveyard Book is also quite good on audio if you're interested in Gaiman's tribute to Kipling's The Jungle Book.
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Mar 25, 2010 18:51
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I'm going on a road trip soon and my car-mates, who know that I have an Audible account, want something funny to while away the hours. My library has zero comedy in it, but I have two Audible credits to burn. Any suggestions?
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Jul 20, 2010 18:04
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mastur posted:Thanks for this. That's a shockingly poor reason to cancel an Audible account. It's an unobtrusive little app that activates when you need to download a book, nothing more. You're missing out on an incredible amount of content for no good reason.
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Feb 11, 2011 18:15
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Tunahead posted:Someone already mentioned them earlier in the thread, but you really can't go wrong with the Rob Inglis reading of The Lord of the Rings. He's got a good speaking voice, a good vocal range for doing different voices, he sings all the songs, he speaks all the languages, it's just top notch stuff all around. Also it's unabridged, which is nice. He also recently did a reading Earthsea Cycle books which is head and shoulders above the atrocious Harlan Ellison version. He nails the crisp, lyrical, almost dreamlike quality of LeGuin's writing. Edit: His reading of The Hobbit is spot-on too.
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Feb 17, 2011 01:11
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Locus posted:I'm not one of those people that just assumes Orson Scott Card loves Hitler or something based on shaky reasoning, and I'm definitely not someone who starts burning books the second anyone dares to say that politics and science are too close when it comes to environmental issues. I just know that Card and I are not in the same realm when it comes to world views and political goals, so I'm a little wary about books by him that heavily revolve around those things. Card's world view does start to slip in to his writing as time goes on. And the post-Ender's Game novels aren't exactly riveting per se: Speaker for the Dead is a classic of science fiction for good reason, but the books that come after it get steadily worse. Ender's Shadow and its "sequels" have a similar problem. Has anyone listened to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms? It's been getting good reviews, but I'm skeptical of the narrator based on the preview.
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Apr 3, 2011 05:27
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Borh posted:Thanks for this. I listened to the first story and enjoyed it a lot. It sort of reminds me of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently books, which is great. By the way I really recommend listening to those, read by Adams himself, if you haven't already. Are there good, unabridged productions of the Dirk Gently books out there anywhere? An ancient cassette version of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is what got me in to audiobooks in the first place, and I'd love to have a quality digital copy of it. Unfortunately Audible only has the dramatizations and an abridged version.
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Apr 4, 2011 22:20
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The General posted:Edit: The only problem I had with the series was that midway through book two I figured out how book 3 was going to end. Though I'm not sure if I'm just clever or Sanderson dropped the ball somewhere. Sanderson dropped the ball. The second book is dreadful.
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Apr 24, 2011 19:09
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Here's an anti-recommendation for Charles Stross' Halting State. One of the book's gimmicks is that it's written in second-person and changes point-of-view characters with every chapter. That's fine in and of itself, but several of the characters are Scottish and the narrator insists on using ear-stabbingly horrible Scottish accents for the entirety of their chapters. You build up a tolerance for it over time, but I'd much rather read it than listen to it. Does anyone have the new full-cast audio version of American Gods who has also listened to the superb George Guidall version or read the original book? I'm not a huge fan of the full-cast version so far - Guidall is the One True Voice for this book, especially Wednesday - but I'm curious as to whether the additional content for the anniversary edition is worth it.
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Jul 17, 2011 21:26
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FuSchnick posted:I don't think that much effort goes into a lot of them. The second book's reader is just fine, but what you're talking about does happen with the narrator for Woken Furies. What's worse is that on one page the narrator reads you the character bitching about how the pronounce his name, and then immediately goes back to mispronouncing the same. That's just pathetic.
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Jul 19, 2011 17:59
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I'm currently in the middle of The Once and Future King read by Neville Jason, and it's easily one of the best readings I've ever heard. Every character is distinct and full of life in a way that enhances the text instead of just transmitting it. Neville's Merlin and child-Arthur are especially well done. All that, and it's a steal at one credit for 33 hours of listening. I really can't recommend this one highly enough.
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Sep 25, 2011 07:38
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gmq posted:Besides Harry Potter, are there any good or interesting books read by Stephen Fry? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I love the original Adams narration of the Hitchhiker's series, but Fry does a superb job and the quality of the recording is much cleaner. Unfortunately I don't think he did the entire series, so you'd only have his dulcet tones for two books out of five. He's also done what sounds like a charming take on Winnie the Pooh as part of a full-cast recording, but I don't own that one so I can't speak to it beyond the preview.
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Jan 15, 2012 18:05
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coyo7e posted:Yeah, William Gibson's reading voice is simply terrible. This became common knowledge twenty years ago when the audiobook version of Neuromancer, read by the author, was released. It had terrible reviews. Confession time: I love that version to death. Gibson's abridged reading of Neuromancer was the first audiobook I ever listened to at the age of ten. Listening to it now after becoming a bit of an audiobook snob and reading the full version of Neuromancer many, many times, I can see the flaws in the Gibson reading. Even so, something about it just works for me. The abridgement turns a book that's already a bit chaotic and disorienting into a fever dream, and Gibson's bizarre accent and cadence just feel "Sprawl" to me. Nostalgia is clearly at work here because it is an objectively bad abridgement and a bad-to-decent reading, but there's something about it that speaks to me.
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Jan 31, 2012 06:42
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Roydrowsy posted:Right now I'm listening to "Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick. I'm not a huge non-fiction person, but I caught them talking about it on NPR and knew I had to check it out. While parts of it are extremely technical, it is an interesting look into what it meant to be an actual hacker. Seconding this, but with the caveat that the tone of the book is incredibly smug and self-satisfied, and the narrator seems to deliberately add to that. If you can tolerate massive doses of  then Ghost in the Wires is a great listen.
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Mar 21, 2012 03:57
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S-Alpha posted:I just got through the entirety of the Addison Neuromancer audiobook during a shift at work today, and both the book and performance were great. I'm totally gonna give it another listen tomorrow. For the most part, his character voices were good, but the one he had for The Finn was ~fabulous~, very deliberately camp, but I actually liked it. Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon has a great narrator. The series gets less cyberpunk as it goes along, but the first book is completely self-contained.
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Jun 12, 2012 16:48
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Strange Matter and anyone else who has read The Quantum Thief on audio: how was it? I've skimmed the book at stores and it looks like something I have to read, but I get the impression it would be one of those books like Anathem or The Malazan Books of the Fallen that throw you in the deep end and expect you to start swimming. Those tend not to be well-suited to a format where you can't easily re-read a section or flip to the glossary to figure out what's going on.
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Dec 10, 2012 18:41
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Lascivious Sloth posted:I also just finished this and it was great. I think I'll listen to 11/22/63. Does anyone have a recommendation for any particular Stephen King audiobooks and/or narrators? The Talisman and Black House both have the same superb narrator, Frank Muller, and they're some of King's best books.
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Jan 25, 2014 03:56
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I'm one of the ones polarized by the Audible version of Ancillary Justice. The book is incredible and absolutely deserves the major awards that rained down on it, but the narration was so grating that I had to go out and get a print copy to finish it. Ciulla's reading feels forced, partly because of the way she enunciates anything that isn't a normal English word (which, in this book, is a lot of words). Bernadette Dunne does something similar in the MaddAddam books, this combination of cadence and over-enunciation that puts so much emphasis on the made-up words that they stand out like crazy. Who are the great female narrators anyway, the equivalents of legends like George Guidall and Jonathan Davis? I've heard samples from Tandy Cronyn and Rebecca Lowman, and they both sounded great in the five minutes of exposure I've had to them, but it'd be nice to hear of some others.
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Nov 23, 2014 20:01
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mystes posted:The only exception I can find is Susan Duerden, whose narration of Embassytown and The Rook I thought was pretty good, but while she has apparently done a large number of books, the vast majority aren't in genres I'm interested in. Embassytown always struck me as impossible to do as an audiobook, given the nature of Ariekei Language and how important that is to the story. How do they handle it? In the print version they show Language words stacked on top of each other, separated by a horizontal bar like a fraction. Edit: Ah, Susan Duerden did the Mina Harker chapters of Audible's Dracula. Yep, that's a good narrator right there. Kestral fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Nov 23, 2014 |
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Nov 23, 2014 21:56
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The New Black posted:Huh, didn't even know there was another version. On the UK store there is only the one read by Adjoa Andoh, which was the one I was praising so highly. I think both versions are available on audible.com. Sadly no, the US apparently only gets the Celeste Ciulla version. Too bad, because I was able to find a sample of the Andoh version, and yeah, she's much better suited.
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Nov 28, 2014 23:45
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EdsTeioh posted:drat. I thought he was full of poo poo this whole time. Not only does it exist, it's kind of amazing. Reposting thoughts on it from 2012: Gibson's abridged reading of Neuromancer was the first audiobook I ever listened to at the age of ten. Listening to it now after becoming a bit of an audiobook snob and reading the full version of Neuromancer many, many times, I can see the flaws in the Gibson reading. Even so, something about it just works. The abridgement turns a book that's already a bit chaotic and disorienting into a fever dream, and Gibson's bizarre accent and cadence just feel "Sprawl" in a way that people who try to read it more like a neo-noir don't manage. Nostalgia is clearly at work here because it is an objectively bad abridgement and a bad-to-decent reading, but there's something about it that speaks to me.
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Oct 7, 2016 18:35
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Peas and Rice posted:Last Call by Tim Powers. If you haven't read it, buckle up. Seconding this along with virtually everything else Tim Powers has done, especially Declare and The Stress of Her Regard. Also highly recommended: The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, which is Gaiman-y as hell. It starts with a woman's investigation into the disappearance of her cruel and mysterious adoptive father, who may or may not be God, and gets substantially weirder from there.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:32
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coyo7e posted:Library At Mount Char. Library At Mount Char isn't quite a horror book, but it's really good.
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Jun 7, 2017 00:20
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Has anyone here listened to Ninefox Gambit or The Malazan Book of the Fallen series? If so, how hard are they to follow in audio form? There's a lot of reviews saying Ninefox in particular drops you into the deep end and expects you to swim, and I recall needing to use the index a lot when I read the first couple Malazan books years ago.
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Aug 6, 2017 00:06
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lofi posted:I've been listening to the audiobook of Gormenghast, and I'm absolutely loving it - which is weird, given I found the actual-book-version impenetrable. I think it's because I can draw while I listen, and let the atmosphere sink in rather than reading and being all 'why is it taking three pages for a dude to walk across a room, ffs'. That's great to hear, I've been trying to decide whether to tackle it in audio, where I do the vast majority of my reading but which isn't always good for denser or more challenging material, and paper. Do you find you're able to keep up with it without zoning out?
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Aug 6, 2018 19:10
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MOVIE MAJICK posted:Alright, I'm done and need more in line with this and David foster Wallace, where you have authors who narrate their own works really well. Any recommendations guys? Neil Gaiman narrates most of his own books, and they're great. Not only does he have an excellent reading voice, he seems to have a style that lends itself to being read aloud.
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May 15, 2019 08:07
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Folks looking for good female narrators should check out Ashes if you're into cosmic horror / haunted houses, Light Brigade for socially conscious milSF, and The Library at Mount Char for deeply strange modern fantasy that will resonate with anyone who's ever played Nobilis.
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Aug 20, 2019 01:32
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I enjoyed Porter's work on Ghost in the Wires and 14.
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Aug 30, 2019 18:20
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Audible's Dracula is fantastic. Ender's Game is a majority-solo narration like Dune, and it works quite well.
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Dec 30, 2019 18:44
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CrazySalamander posted:Seconding this. Excellent production value. If you enjoyed The Martian, you will enjoy this book. Thirded, with the caveat that Project Hail Mary is much, much more sci-fi than The Martian. It's excellent hard SF, but go into it knowing that it's not quite as grounded as the previous one. Book is still a total blast though, and I'd go so far as to say that the audiobook is the definitive version.
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May 21, 2021 20:11
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Lumbermouth posted:Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road is a swashbuckling adventure set in 10th century Khazaria and it's read by Andre loving Braugher. A quick, fun and dulcet smooth listen. Emphatically seconding this, it's great. If you've been reading Kalpa Imperial, the current Book of the Month, Gentlemen of the Road has some resonance there as well.
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Apr 13, 2022 18:44
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my kinda ape posted:IDK about REALLY coming to life but I quite enjoyed the Audible version of Dracula. I can't second this hard enough, Audible Dracula is a masterpiece.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:53
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Mister Facetious posted:Something Awful goons need to get in on narrating these. I gave some serious consideration to trying my hand at recording an audiobook, until AI voice generation hit the scene last year and I saw the writing on the wall. Hell, it’s pretty much mature enough to be a viable substitute already, especially if the book you want to read would sound good narrated by Dagoth-Ur!
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Apr 29, 2023 00:12
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This is somehow the first I've heard of Richard Poe, and it led me to listen to the first few minutes of 48 Laws of Power. Great narrator, but holy poo poo that book is like The Sociopath's Handbook. I admit to a soft spot for Stefan Rudnicki, since the full-cast version of Ender's Game he was in was one of my first audiobooks. You know who else kicks rear end as a narrator? Tim Curry. He rules in Audible's versions of Dracula and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and I quite enjoyed his take on Sabriel. Speaking of Draculas, Christopher Lee did only a very few audiobooks, but one of those is Children of Hurin, and he is perfect for it. It's an absolute goddamn shame he was never commissioned to do The Silmarillion. Still, Martin Shaw's take The Silmarillion is fantastic - I greatly prefer it to Andy Serkis's version. Lee actually did a fair number of audiobooks back in the day, but many of them haven't been re-released, and you have to go on YouTube to find them - he read a ton of Poe, and it's all quite good. Rounding out the Tolkien narrators, Rob Inglis does he my preferred versions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. He sounds like your grandfather reading those stories to you at bedtime, and it's perfect.
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Feb 25, 2024 08:40
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jeeves posted:Many modern phone apps want you to stream audiobooks due to the whole current era of "rent everything forever and own nothing!" corporate mentality. F dat. This is the way. I've had audiobooks vanish from my Audible library, never to return, which are now impossible to find outside of  . Now I archive everything and ensure it's playable offline.
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Mar 15, 2024 10:57
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Soonmot posted:I'm now on book 5, I can't believe how fast I went from "oh this is cute and silly fun," to "Wait is this actually good?" I had this experience with Cradle a while back, and I’m currently watching a friend fall deep into the light novel / webnovel hole on that same progression. I’m reasonably certain what’s happening is our brains are just being terraformed by this stuff. Expose yourself to enough of something that’s just good enough to get past your filters, and you can start building up engagement with it. Like, I would hesitate to call the Cradle series good books, but they’re fun and trivially easy to read, so you can ingest huge amounts of it, and at a certain point you’ve spent so much time with those characters that the fact that its prose is mediocre at best stops mattering.
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Apr 21, 2024 22:32
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Soonmot posted:I'm a comic book fan, I understand that type of thing lol. Looks like it gets discussed in the Web Serials thread, though I'm not sure how much.
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Apr 22, 2024 02:30
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