STACKED

books

Listen up!

|

Do you listen to audio books?

I admit to being new to listening to them, afraid my attention span and ability to listen for comprehension of lengthy books would not allow me to get anything out of them. When I moved, though, and my commute went from no time to close to an hour, I gave them a try and am glad I did. Now I’m able to get more reading into each and every day. Moreover, I’m able to dig into books I may otherwise not pick up to read, simply because I’m a captive audience in the car and am willing to give anything a try.

This weekend, I traveled up to Wisconsin to attend a conference on listening for literacy which focused on audio books. As a newbie to audio books, I learned about how naive I’d been and how little I really knew about audio books and what makes them good and bad (though admittedly, I knew there WAS a reason I loved the audios of Al Capone Does My Shirts, Dairy Queen, and Wednesday Wars and was just not crazy about books like The Dead and the Gone and Nineteen Minutes).

Rather than give a blow-by-blow of the entire day, I thought I’d share some of the cool things I learned that might make you a better listener, as well.

First and foremost, I learned there are three types of audio books:

  • Fully voiced — this is when there is a separate voice for each character, and the Harry Potter series would be a good example. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a different person doing each voice, but rather, it could be one person who has developed enough voices for each character. I’ll talk more on this in a bit.
  • Partially or semi-voiced — this is when the main character and perhaps 1-2 of the other major characters have separate voices. The rest of the characters are in the general narrator’s voice.
  • Unvoiced — this is when the narrator just reads the story and (hopefully) reads it well.

Although listeners can have a preference for one of these, they can all be done well or all be done poorly. But what makes a good audio book and what makes a bad one? If you’re listening to one and aren’t sure, consider these:

  • Are the words pronounced correctly? Is the narrator using an authentic accent? One of the presenters mentioned a book set in Wisconsin where the narrator had a mid-Atlantic accent and it really killed the book for her as a Wisconsinite. The Dairy Queen, on the other hand, has an authentic Wisconsin accent.
  • Is the book complete with a clear, crisp sound? Is the volume consistent?
  • Do you hear juicy mouth sounds? Is the narrator’s voice hoarse?
  • Has the producer done a good job if material was dubbed not making it obvious? Is the text being repeated or omitted or cut too short? Are chapter breaks awkward or poorly timed?
  • Are names of the title, author, and narrator correct? One of the presenters said that there was one book where the reader mispronounced the name Nguyen and a student with that name was turned off entirely (for those of you unsure, that’s “win,” and the reader said “nah-guy-en”)
  • Does the reader mostly match the age and experience — at least in sound — to the main characters?
  • The readers connect to the text and are generally excited by the reading and discovery in the beauty of the story and the language.
  • Is music used effectively? Walden — the one by Thoreau — apparently has fantastic music interludes and was lauded for that reason.

All of these aspects are what people who listen to audio books begin to understand. They develop a “listening literacy” in a way that readers who read a lot develop about books — pacing, voice, and so forth. Moreover, listeners also gain stronger understanding of cause and effect, predictability, and how language works. During a panel that brought in local teens to talk with us about their listening habits, it was very cool hearing how much they love learning new vocabulary through listening.

Reflecting on my own audio book experiences and thinking about these things, I know exactly what it was about each of my listens that made it enjoyable or less enjoyable.

Back to my earlier comment about fully voiced audio books — have any of you listened to a production by Fullcast Audio? The director and two voice actors (David Kelly who did Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn and Chelsea Mixon of Shannon Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days) came to talk about their company. Rather than depend on one or two narrators, Fullcast hires, well, a voice for each character. Think reader’s theatre on audio. I’ve yet to listen to one, but after seeing a piece about their forthcoming production of Eyes Like Stars and listening to David and Chelsea do a scene from Hale’s book, I can say I plan on hunting out a few of their titles at the library now!

Finally, I wanted to say that listening to teens talk about their favorite audio books was so insightful. I think there were probably 15 or so students there, and the most surprising and exciting thing they said was that audio books are the reason they’re willing to try books they otherwise would never pick up from the shelf. Need I mention the boys ALL said that the Twilight series was one of their favorites to listen to?

So, do you do audio books? What are some of your favorites? What do you listen for? If you haven’t, perhaps you’d love to try your hand at winning a copy of The Dairy Queen from us.

As for me, I’m listening to M. T. Anderson’s Feed, even though it’s a book I’d never pick up. What a fantastically done audio book that has really drawn me in.

Giveaway!

|

To celebrate being a part of the Cybils AND to celebrate the forthcoming release of the third volume, Front and Center, in the aforementioned Dairy Queen series, I’m having a giveaway.

As I made clear, I loved, loved, loved the audio version of this book. It was well done, with an authentic voice for D.J.

So guess what?

I’m giving away the audio book for The Dairy Queen.

The rules are simple:
1. Comment to enter with your email address.
2. You can have ONE addition entry by promoting this contest — I don’t care how you promote it, whether via blog, sidebar, or twitter. Just leave the address of where you promoted it in your comment. You need to make this a separate comment.

So, simple: you may have up to two comments on this one.

Front and Center is in stores October 19, so this contest runs through then.

BBC America Audiobook club

|


Here at STACKED, we like audiobooks. We also like book clubs. So why not put the two together? That’s just what the lovely folks over at BBC Audiobooks America have done. Their June selection is Peter Benchley’s Jaws, and they’ll be having a discussion at their facebook page from June 24-28. Just become a fan of the group and then dazzle everyone with your insights. As long as you’re located in the United States or Canada, you can participate.

It just so happens that June is audiobook month, so this is a good opportunity for those of you who might not have thought about picking one up to get in on the movement. I have yet to enter a library that doesn’t have audiobooks for checkout, and Jaws is such a classic, it would surprise me greatly if your own local library didn’t have it. Then you can tell us if it’s true that the book is always better than the movie. (In my oh so humble opinion, this is not a true adage, but that is a topic for another day…)

Unreliable Narrators

|

I started listening to the next Amelia Peabody book – The Hippopotamus Pool – a few days ago. It started out a little differently than the previous books. Instead of Amelia diving right in to the narrative without much preamble, the “editor” of Mrs. Amelia Peabody Emerson’s personal diaries sprinkled her own commentary via footnotes throughout a rather lengthy introduction by Mrs. Emerson herself that recounted the major events of the previous books. It served a dual purpose: catch the reader (or listener, as in my case) up to speed on the pertinent events of the previous books that would impact the events of the current one, and make us laugh. Take this passage:

Text: “The date of my birth is irrelevant. I did not truly exist until 1884, when I was in my late twenties.”

Footnote: “This is not consistent with other sources. However, the editors were of the opinion it would be discourteous to question a lady’s word.”

The “other source” the editor refers to is in fact the first novel in the series, when Miss Peabody tells her readers that she is thirty-two years old in 1884. The editor points out other inconsistencies throughout the introduction, and they all made me grin. While I love Amelia all the more for it, it also made me wonder…exactly how much should I take her at her word? Is her dashing husband really all that dashing, or is he only dashing when seen through her eyes? (Isn’t the latter much more romantic anyway?) It helps that the editor is voiced by Davina Porter, who is one of my top five favorite audiobook narrators.

A few other famous unreliable narrators include Dr. Sheppard from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Briony Tallis from Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I have varying levels of tolerance and appreciation for stories with unreliable – or outright dishonest – narrators, and it depends on the purpose of the character being written in such a way. With Amelia, it’s done for comedic effect, and I love it. In Atonement, it seems as if Ian McEwan did it to make me cry (it worked). Oh, and to bring up all those fancy meta-fiction issues while he’s at it. I thought it was brilliant, and it helped lessen my antagonistic feelings toward Briony. (I also thought the movie adaptation was just as good as the book, a quality that is very rare.) I can just imagine Dame Agatha patting herself on the back and grinning slyly when she first devised the events of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’m still undecided on whether I believe what she did was a genius move or a dirty cheat. Then again, it can be argued that fiction needs to be related by a less than honest narrator in order for the fiction to be honest at all, another one of those true oxymorons.

If you’re interested in reading books with a narrator who may not be entirely trustworthy, check out the three I’ve mentioned above and the few below:

Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz
Odd Thomas (not short for Todd) is a twenty year old fry cook who sees dead people. It’s much better and much less creepy than the Sixth Sense, and Odd as a narrator is engaging, likable, and honest – usually. In the first installment (it became so popular it blossomed into a series), Odd must stop some very bad men from perpetrating something horrible upon his small California town. Unless you have a cold cold heart, the ending will make you cry.

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by Jon Scieszka
I outgrew picture books very early on in my reading life, but this is one that I returned to many times. Scieszka is just so clever with everything he writes. Here, Alexander T. Wolf sets the record straight – he was not an evildoer who huffed and puffed, he simply had a very bad cold. And the pigs were rude anyway. Telling classic stories from the point of view of the “bad guy” has always been popular, but no one has done it better than Scieszka.

The Banned and the Banished, by James Clemens
You probably haven’t heard of this series. I don’t blame you if you haven’t – it’s a fantasy that is typical of its genre, with a lot of magic, black-hearted villains, and young good-looking heroes. It’s the kind of stuff that I just eat up. The editor prefaces each book with a notice that everything you will be reading is false, the author of the book is a traitor, and in order to even be allowed to read his/her lies, you must be an advanced scholar, put your thumbprint on the page, and swear to tell no one what you have read. It’s up to you to determine which person – the editor or the author – is the unreliable one. This aspect of the series is what hooked me, although it tells a very entertaining story too.

While searching Goodreads and Librarything for books tagged as unreliable narrators, I came across James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Two Librarything users had tagged this nonfiction book, now notorious for its falseness, as having an unreliable narrator. I suppose in the strictest meaning of the phrase, it’s true. But there’s a sense with fiction that it’s okay for the writer to deceive us – it’s not the writer who’s doing the deceiving anyway, is it? The deceitful one is the narrator, who we all learn in grade school English classes is a separate entity from the author. So perhaps I should give Christie a free pass after all – Dr. Sheppard is the one who pulled the wool over my eyes.

What’s your take? Do you like reading books with unreliable narrators, or would you prefer it if the narrator just told it to you straight? Did you want to strangle Christie after she so blatantly and inexcusably broke one of the primary rules of detective fiction? What are some other books with unreliable narrators that I should check out?