From the "They Just Didn't Care" Department

I mentioned before that I like to listen to audiobooks while I'm driving. A while ago, I got downloaded a stack of Robert A. Heinlein audiobooks, and I've been going through the ones I hadn't listened to before. The quality of the recordings vary widely. A lot of them come from the Library of Congress, some initiative they had for books for the blind. I'm guessing they're in there because they're probably public domain.

Currently, I'm listening to Methuselah's Children, and I feel confident in saying that it is the worst audio recording I've ever listened to. Each track in the book appears to be read by a different person, and it seems clear that each one is reading the book for the first time. The reading is flat and emotionless, with all the warmth of someone reading a shopping list out loud. And it seems that everything was done on the first take, as you can hear the woman doing the reading stumble over words, and repeat parts that she messed up. In one particular case, the woman even sighed in exasperation before re-reading one line. They also read off each page number, which I don't understand at all. It's like on TV when you see a character pretending to be a bad actor, and their lines are delivered like "Well, I must be going. Exit stage left. Oh, sorry, I wasn't supposed to read that part."

In particular, it seems like the reader for Track 3 hadn't so much as glanced at her part before reading it to the recorder. There's awkward pauses at least once a sentence, more if the sentence contains words not normally used in English conversation. She even managed to mispronounce Heinlein's name at the beginning of the track. Normally I would wonder what the director was thinking when he or she was working on this book, but it's obvious that there was no such director, of if there was, they were fast asleep the entire recording. I can't say I blame the director, either. The readers managed to make daring death-defying escapes sound not only boring, but tedious. They read what the main character had for breakfast and a description of him taking down an armed cop with equal gusto, which is to say none at all.

What makes this especially annoying is that I've listened to some audio books that were done very well, with readers who brought a sense of pride and craft into what they were reading. A lot of them are accomplished voice actors, and give each character their own voice, from tone to timbre to accent. The people reading Methuselah's Children sound like they're doing it as a punishment.

I've heard other audiobooks done by multiple readers, but those were cases of giving narratives by different characters a distinct flavor. It adds to the sense that you're being told the story from different perspectives. In the case of this book, I find myself dreading if the next reader can possibly be any worse than the one before.

One good example of an audio book done right would be the Harry Potter audio books. I understand there's a couple different versions: the British audio books, read by Stephen Fry. Some may know Fry as the other half of Fry and Laurie, the latter of which is famous in America as Gregory House. I haven't listened to them, but I understand they're very good. The American audio books are done by Jim Dale, who, if you'll excuse the pun, is a veritable wizard of voice acting. He's so good at doing voices for the characters that you'd swear there's four or five other people in the room with him. One thing that really impressed me is that he can do convincing female voices. Most voice actors have trouble doing voices of the opposite sex. Women voiced by men sound shrill or like high-pitched men, while men voiced by women tend to sound like they have bad head colds or chew gravel daily.

It should come as no surprise that the women doing this audiobook don't even bother with voices. Hell, sometimes it's difficult to tell when they switch from dialogue to narration, as they don't even bother to pause between paragraphs. They even switch between different sections of the book without pausing, which a couple times had me wondering why one of the characters was suddenly the President of the United States. They do the same when stating page numbers (I still can't figure out why they're telling blind people what page they should be on), sometimes not even pausing when the page change occurs mid-sentence. So you'll get sentences like this. "We have to get out of page 42 here as soon as we can." Which is a very jarring experience, leading me to wonder why the person on the other end of that dialogue doesn't ask "Why did you just say 'page 42?'" At least, that's what I'd ask the reader if I could.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights