What are we listening to? (audiobooks)

[davtay]

Just finished John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Another fantastic listen. Great novel with Grover Gardner narrating.

[neil_swann80]

The complete works of Sherlock Homes narrated by Stephen Fry. Perfection.

[issybird]

I’m listening to two audiobooks: The Three Clerks by Anthony Trollope read by Nigel Paterson and Sharpe’s Command by Bernard Cornwell read by Rupert Farley.

The Trollope so far is one of his better stand-alone novels, a welcome relief after the last two I read which were stinkers and Paterson does an excellent job with the voices.. The Sharpe is rather Sharpe-lite but he’s still back on form, also a welcome relief after two clunkers. Farley isn’t entirely successful at delineating separate voices and his women sound like men, but he’s still fine. I miss Frederick Davidson, but there’s no denying that his Patrick Harper sounded like the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

This is my 27th Trollope and my 23rd Sharpe. Nothing like sticking to one’s comfort zone!

[CRussel]

I'll pass on the Trollope, I fear. But it's past time I returned to Sharpe.

[issybird]

I've been bingeing on the Nero Wolfe books read by Michael Prichard while swimming and since the pool will be open another month (brr!) I should squeeze in a few more. His women's voices could use more differentiation, but they don't jar. And his Wolfe is fabulous, which is what matters, and his Archie excellent, conveying the dry humor underlying the story. Just for funsies, I listened to some Nero Wolfe radio programs with Sidney Greenstreet as Wolfe and as good as he is, he's inferior to Prichard.

[ApK]

I'm listening to the third of John Lescroart's Wyatt Hunt series, "The Hunter." I've enjoyed all the previous Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky/Wyatt Hunt shared-universe audiobooks. I noted the Audible reviews for this one were pretty much unanimously hostile toward the narrator. I figured it was probably a small vocal group who missed the previous narrators and just didn't like change.
Nope, they were right. This guy ranges from mediocre to absolutely awful. He mispronounces a main character name that has been consistently established in half a dozen previous audiobooks, he mispronouces some relative common words, half his characters sound like voices a gradeschooler would use when playing with cartoon action figures, and the rest of the dialog is delivered in an odd labored monotone, that reminds of when the barely-literate football jock in my high school English class had to read aloud a passage from whatever book he was supposed to have done a book report on but obviously had never cracked open. I don't know how this got through the system. I expect better of Audible.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by issybird

I've been bingeing on the Nero Wolfe books read by Michael Prichard while swimming and since the pool will be open another month (brr!) I should squeeze in a few more. His women's voices could use more differentiation, but they don't jar. And his Wolfe is fabulous, which is what matters, and his Archie excellent, conveying the dry humor underlying the story. Just for funsies, I listened to some Nero Wolfe radio programs with Sidney Greenstreet as Wolfe and as good as he is, he's inferior to Prichard.

Prichard's Wolfe is superb. I've had to skip a few of them, just because they're just a bit _too_ much of the era. And while one can put up with Wolfe's misogyny since it's really only referred to, but rarely actually expressed, Archie's casual racism is sometimes a bit more than I can handle these days. None the less, a fabulous oeuvre, and I just skip over the more obnoxious of the books. It's not like there aren't a lot of them!