Do you have a preference for your audiobook narration? Today, Kim and I will talk a bit about our preferences and what differences these production choices make.

Up until recently, the only audiobooks I had ever listened to (that I can remember) were single-voiced.  One person narrated all characters, with varying success.  Some narrators chose to differentiate each character’s voice drastically, while others changed their voice only slightly, if at all.  I honestly didn’t even know that audiobooks existed where each character was voiced by a different person until a few months ago.  My first experience with a fully-voiced audiobook was Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which I’ll be reviewing later today.

Even more recently, I’ve ventured into listening to books narrated by multiple characters – and thus voiced by different narrators.  Make sense?  What I’m referring to is Edith Pattou’s East, which shifts perspective from character to character with each chapter.  It’s an interesting way of writing a book and a really interesting way of listening to it.  Each character speaks within the other characters’ sections, so the listener hears how each character interprets the other.  This is the kind of insight into characters that is really unique to audiobooks – it’s impossible to understand from a print book that a daughter hears her father’s voice as gentle while a son may hear it in harsher tones (unless of course it’s spelled out for you in the text).

I don’t think I really have a preference when it comes to one vs. multiple voices, provided the narration is expressive and paints a picture in my mind.  What I do prefer, however, is for the audiobook to be – by and large – free of sound effects.  Music to divide chapters is generally okay, but anything beyond that is just excessive (and so cheesy it makes me cringe).  Audiobooks should be a faithful presentation of the text, and added noise of thunderstorms or horse’s hooves is inauthentic to the story the author has written. (Of course, there’s an exception to every rule, and I have to say that Feed used sound effects in a really effective way.)

I haven’t listened to enough audiobooks to have a clear preference on what style I prefer, quite frankly. I had the opportunity to meet a producer and a couple of readers from the Full Cast company, and I loved getting an insider’s look at how these books are put together. The example they showed us was from Lisa Mantchev’s Eyes Like Stars, and while I haven’t been able to pick it up to listen to yet, I was impressed with how much like reader’s theater it was. For a book about life in the theater, I would think it essential to employ a full cast.

I got a real kick out of the use of multiple narrators for Stockett’s The Help. Three narrators take turns as the main characters, and a fourth narrator is introduced during a couple of pivotal, non-charactered scenes. I thought for this book, it was necessary to use the different voices, as the women were of different ages and races, something that would never have worked as a single reader. Despite loving the production, I still found some of the choices didn’t work for me.

What I get a kick out of, though, are partially-voiced audiobooks. I love when one reader provides the voices for a few of the main characters in a story — but only if the book is told from the first person perspective. If a story is told through the eyes of one character, using just one reader seems to fit better, and by partially voicing it, we are able to get a true insight into the main character. We know, for example, that the main character thinks he has a whiny-sounding sister or that the mom always sounds regal. The Art of Racing in the Rain, told partially voiced from the dog’s perspective, worked well for me, too.

I guess for me the preference falls to the story itself. Does it lend itself to a full cast better than a single narrator? Does it require drastically different sounding readers for the different parts? These are the things I think about when listening and that ultimately helps decide whether the book’s been successful to me as a listener.

Do you have a preference? We’d like to hear! Share your thoughts below.

Today, we’re talking audiobook reviews. Ever curious how we write a review or what we listen for to comment on when planning to review a title? Here’s your insight into our minds, as well as what we hope are helpful pointers for the new listener, new reviewer, or seasoned pro looking for a little more vocabulary for what they’re doing!

For me, it’s all about the narrator and the production/editing of the book. When I listen, I know immediately whether the book is going to work for me or not. I have ended books well before I should have on audio — whereas most print books I’ll give 50 pages, the audiobook has just about 10 minutes. I need to be hooked into a believable narrator immediately. Books that haven’t worked for me tend to have either a lot of weird editing issues — where you hear the reader swallowing, the sound quality changes from track to track so you need to keep adjusting your volume, or there are background noises distracting from the reader — or it has reader issues — the age of the reader doesn’t match the character or the accent is all wrong.

In writing audio reviews, I follow my gut a little more than I do with a printed text. I am willing to talk more about my shortfalls as a listener, too, as you probably remember from my review of Zen and the Art of Faking It. I do use a little bit of a cheat sheet to make sure I hit on as many important points as I can, and that little cheat sheet is from my post right here. I like to look at that to hit on the things that matter, but that I don’t necessarily consciously look for, when listening to a book (since I’m listening to the story).

Since I brought up narrator, I thought I’d share with you my best experiences and my worst. My favorite narrators are Joel Johnstone (from The Wednesday Wars and Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie) and Natalie Moore (from The Dairy Queen). Both fit their characters in the books perfectly and they did so in a way that was authentic to the age, gender, race, and accent to the listener. Moore delivers a pitch-perfect Wisconsin accent that made me sad that I had to READ the last book before I could listen to it. She will always be the voice of D. J. to me.

On the worst end, I had a rough time with Susan Beth Pfeffer’s The Dead and the Gone on audio, as well as Andrew Smith’s In the Path of Falling Objects. I couldn’t find the voices as matching the story . . . and interestingly, the reader of Smith’s work was the reader for Zen and the Art of Faking It, which fit much better for me as a listener. Proof that it’s not necessarily the reader who makes the book hard to go to; it’s the need to match the reader with the right character.

 Much of what Kelly wrote above applies to my audio review style as well.  For me, a lot depends on the narration.  While good narration doesn’t always save a bad book, bad narration will almost certainly ruin a good one.  I’m currently listening to Going Bovine, Libba Bray’s huge doorstopper of a book that most recently won the Printz, and the narration is almost killing me.  The book is in first-person, and the voice is just so wrong.  Apart from sounding much too old, the narrator infuses sarcasm, sardonicism, and irony into every single sentence.  This is not so bad some of the time, because Cameron, our protagonist, is frequently sarcastic.  The problem manifests itself when he tells the listener something like “I went to the store.”  Imagine hearing all lines that are meant to be matter of fact, emotionally moving, or exciting as sarcastic.  It’s grating.

That rant over…other annoyances include mispronunciation of words, long gaps between pieces of dialogue in a conversation (sounds fake), and, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, poorly done female voices (usually by a male narrator).

Poor production values can also get to me, but it’s not something I make a habit of listening for consciously.  If something sticks out (usually a bad something), I’ll remark upon it, but otherwise, I don’t pay a lot of attention.

All the importance of the narration aside, when I review an audio for the blog or other medium, I try to devote half the space to the actual story and writing.  I like to give our blog readers an impression of whether or not they’d enjoy the book in either format – audio or print – and I can’t do that by concentrating only on the narration.  If the narration is bad, it’s good to note that the story itself is good, so interested readers will check out the print version (and vice versa).

Welcome to Audiobook Week. From now until Friday, celebrate with us as we offer insights into the power of audiobooks, as well as a load of reviews. Join in and share your thoughts as we discuss the excitement and challenges that being an audiobook listener brings.

Today, we’ll be talking the pillars of journalism: who, what, when, where, and why (mostly).

I’ve always been an audiobook listener.  When I was a child, my family would take annual road trips to various destinations across the country, and to while away the time, we always checked out a big stack of audios.  (Luckily, my hometown library allowed us to keep them for three weeks, so we had no worries about late fees.)  I remember I really loved to listen to the scary story collections, but we would check out a number of different genres.  This still being the era of cassette tapes, the player in the van would occasionally overheat and the narrator’s voice would be transformed into a chipmunk’s – all part of the audiobook experience.  The long car trips in between national parks would not have been nearly as bearable (for my parents, certainly) without these books.

As my siblings and I got older, the selections did, too, and we were soon listening to Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich.  I credit audiobooks for broadening my book horizons.  The public library’s collection of audios was of course much smaller than its collection of print books, so I couldn’t just stick to the genres that were my particular favorites.  I was also not the only selector, so I ended up listening to my brother’s and sister’s selections as well.  While I still have my preferred genres, I read widely and tend to give anything a shot, provided the writing is good.

When I went away to college, my dad would occasionally send me an audio that he had enjoyed recently.  This introduced me to Davina Porter, who so wonderfully narrates Marion Chesney’s clever books and remains one of my favorite audiobook narrators.  It also provided me with a connection to home (I grew up in Texas but went to college in North Carolina).

Now, as an adult, I listen to audiobooks constantly – in the car, while I get ready in the morning, while doing the dishes, or any other time my hands and eyes are occupied with something useful.  The quality of audios varies greatly, just as it does with print books.  It’s not a replacement for the print book in any way – it’s a much different experience.  There’s no tactile component to an audiobook, and that wonderful smell is missing.  But sometimes, an audiobook can bring the story to life much more clearly than just words on a page.  I worry constantly about an audio production marring a story I love by interpreting the voices in a “wrong” way, but each time I’ve listened to one of my favorites, it has only deepened my love for it (if you are a Harry Potter-phile and have not yet listened to the Jim Dale audios, you NEED to check them out now).

I have encountered a few narrators I do not care for, so often if I see a book narrated by someone whose voice I know I enjoy, I’ll pick it up, even if it’s not a genre I usually read.  Anything narrated by Jim Dale, Barbara Rosenblat, or Davina Porter is almost guaranteed to be a hit with me.  A good audio production can sometimes compensate for lackluster writing or a less than engaging plot.  The best audios allow me to close my eyes and feel like I’ve been transported into the author’s world – something a print book can’t do.

I was never an audiobook listener. I’d been listening to people talk about them for a long time, but I never really understood how I could work them into my life.

That was, until I moved to a very rural town in northern Illinois and commuted to the suburbs for work a little over a year ago. My commute, approximately 45 minutes, left me bored with radio; we have about three stations that come in decently. My iPod doesn’t work well because of the poor radio frequencies. I only wanted to listen to my home made CDs so many times.

It was then I dove into my library’s large audiobook selection. While my selections were so-so for a long time, it was after attending a fantastic day-long conference on audio literacy when my mind changed. And the audiobook that did it was M. T. Anderson’s Feed. Besides being well read, it incorporated a ton of cool effects, including commercials that fit the story line. It was journey that made me fall in love with the spoken word, and I’ve been listening non-stop since.

I have only ever listened to audiobooks in the car. It’s a space where I don’t need to do a lot of thinking and a space when I can become fully absorbed in a story (driving through miles and miles of farm land helps). I have been meaning to give listening to them while working out a try, as I’ve known many who find this to be the best way to convince themselves TO work out. Maybe this will be my goal after audiobook week.

What do I listen to on audio? Anything. I find I am a much more receptive listener than reader. I will try new genres and styles, knowing that what makes the book work for me on audio is the reader. I loved Harlan Coben’s Hold Tight on audio, even though the thriller genre is not one of my favorites. The reader sold it to me completely. I really dug Art of Racing in the Rain and The Help on audio, as well. And Sarah Dessen is an easy one for me to pick up on audio.

I thought, too, listening to non-fiction may be difficult on audio, since it takes a lot more to absorb. But I was wrong. The Geography of Bliss may be the best audiobook I’ve listened to. In my car right now, too, is Shooting Stars, the Lebron James story — a recommendation from the high school librarian I collaborate with. It’s not my genre at all, but she told me listening to it made it work really well. Of course, it makes sense: sports WOULD come more alive through listening than reading.

If you have always been curious about audiobook listening, give it a whirl. Your local library likely has a nice selection of titles, including copies of those on the best seller list. Pick up something that’s been recommended, even if it’s outside your genre: much of the art of the audiobook is in the production itself. A good story helps, of course, but sometimes I’ll forgo the story for the production.