Audiobooks = story + narration

May 1, 2010

I’ve never really been an audiobook person: I’m very visual and tactile, so just listening isn’t really enough for me. When I listen in the car, my mind starts to wander and suddenly I have no idea what’s going on in the story, and when I listen at home, I get distracted by some task I’ve been meaning to do and suddenly I’m not paying attention to the narration anymore.

There has been one audiobook I’ve listened to recently that I really enjoyed, though. I thought that Natalie Moore’s reading of Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s DAIRY QUEEN was just perfect; she sounded just like my cousins from Wisconsin and her alternation between earnestness and sarcasm fit DJ so well. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, then, that I really enjoyed the book a lot.

Before DAIRY QUEEN, though, I’d had some bad experiences with audiobooks. The male narrator’s attempt at young girls’ voices in Eoin Colfer’s HALF-MOON INVESTIGATIONS in particular really turned me off to a story I might otherwise have been okay with. The narrator for A MANGO-SHAPED SPACE by Wendy Mass seemed so sarcastic and that didn’t fit with how I imagined the protagonist, and the voices she did for adult women were all weirdly breathy. Even now, thinking about those books, I rate them as slightly below average, but I can’t really separate my feelings about the story from my feelings about how the story was presented.

The worst mismatch between narrator’s voice and protagonist’s voice, though, and the one that finally inspired me to make a decision about how I’m going to listen to audiobooks was Ally Carter’s I’D TELL YOU I LOVE YOU BUT THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU. The protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl at a spy academy, but the narrator gives her this overly excited, almost giddy voice that just didn’t fit my conception of the character in anyway. I kept telling myself to just tough it out, but after about ten minutes I just had to stop because the narration was ruining the book for me.

So as much as I want to be able to make good use of my commute to knock books off of my “to read” list, I think I’m going to have to just listen to audio versions of books I’ve already read. My feelings about the story are too intertwined with my feelings about the narration to be able to evaluate them both at the same time (and draw differing conclusions if necessary). Until I can learn to get over readers’ voices not matching my perception of a book’s characters, I think that’s my only option.

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Tags: audiobooks, ya lit