Sunshine Challenge #3: Share Your Squee: Audiobooks

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Prompt #3 is Share your Squee

I like audiobooks, and I listen mostly to mysteries and classics of Western literature. Here are some voices I’m listening to.



Cyril Hare read by Chris MacDonnell

I’ve listened to two works by Cyril Hare [Untimely Death and An English Murder] and I’m waiting anxiously for my library to acquire the MacDonnell version of Tragedy at Law, which is supposed to be Hare’s best work, featuring his detectives, the mild lawyer Francis Pettigrew and the very competent Inspector Mallett. MacDonnell’s voice is perfect for the historical and legal world of these stories.

Frankenstein read by Simon Vance

Simon Vance is the Webster’s Dictionary of professional narrators. He is the standard by which I measure all others. And like other really, really good professional narrators, such as Simon Prebble and David Timson, he is, far and away, the best there is in terms of simply reading a story well and making you forget he’s even there. When I see his name, I know I don’t have to worry about not liking the reading of whatever it is.

Catherine Aird read by Robin Bailey

This is my current comfort listening. No one does Aird’s DI Sloan & DS Crosby of the Calleshire Chronicles better than Robin Bailey who did at least the first five of the series. I listen to them over and over. They are available (with varying quality) on youtube. I recommend highest The Complete Steel also known as The Stately Home Murders. What he does best is the banter between Sloan and his superior Chief Inspector Leeyes. Bailey died in 1999, and the rest of her stories are narrated by others who are serviceable but not brilliant.

I’ve talked about others in other posts. My favourite actor-narrators are Cumberbatch [Ngaio Marsh’s Artist in Crime and Death in a White Tie and Scales of Justice]; Dan Stevens [Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None] and Bronson Pinchot [Highsmith's Strangers on a Train].

POC. I should listen to POC narrators. I did like Neil de Grasse Tyson’s narration of Astrophysics for Busy People, unfortunately it was a book where I was too dim to follow the material (despite the lovely voice) and returned it after three chapters.

Women? I should listen to more women narrators. If anyone has recommendations, please offer them. I do like Jennifer M. Dixon who does Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant novels. British (or at least non-American) female voices are always preferred.

There are many actor-narrators that I adore as actors but hate as narrators, and there are some actor-narrators whose voices are so distinct that it makes it sort of impossible to forget who is talking. But the point of this is to talk about squee so I’m not going to mention them unless a commentor does.

Comments

Inspector Grant

[oldtoadwoman]

I'm feeling really dense right now. I read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time many years ago and never picked up on the fact that it was part of a series.

Re: Inspector Grant

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Yes, of all of them, I'd recommend the first, The Man in the Queue.

Re: Inspector Grant

[oldtoadwoman]

I just requested the ebook from my library. I'm third on the list.

Re: Inspector Grant

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I do hope you like it!!

[smallhobbit]

I've you to thank for getting me back into audiobooks when you recommended Benedict Cumberbatch and Inspector Alleyn.

I've added Cyril Hare to my library 'to read' list.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Great.

I don't know what your voice sounds like, but I friend-cast it as Jennifer M. Dixon's, the one that reads the Inspector Grant novels. And I know I can't hope to know what debriswoman's voice, but there was an episode of Edwardian farm where an older lady tells Ruth Goodman in a very debriswoman's way that she (Ruth) will never make a decent lace-maker and it sounded like something debriswoman would say and the way she would say it.

Great. He was a judge, so the solutions hinge on a particular point of law, though the setting isn't usually (or wholly) a courtroom. I did buy a copy of Tragedy at Law from abebooks, but I'm still holding out that my library will pick up the audiobook version. Chris MacDonell does a great job with the voices. And Pettigrew is an average barrister but Inspector Mallett is very competent and Pettigrew's wife isn't an idiot and she is kind to her husband and helps the case along at points (in Untimely Death).

[jesse_the_k]

David Oyelowo reads John Le Carré's The Mission Song and it's wonderful. Oyelowo is brilliant at accents, and there are scores of them, beautifully deployed. His beautiful voice embodies Le Carré's jaded viewpoint.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I just put myself on the library waiting list for it! Thank you so much for the rec!!

Yep! I'm another audio fan. I gravitate towards audio

[jesse_the_k]

when I'm reading a book outside of my own cultural experience. Why wonder how that name is pronounced or how the joke is delivered when I can enjoy an expert narrator?

I've recently enjoyed these titles:

Trevor Noah's reading of his own memoir, Born a Crime

Ruby Dee reading Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Sherman Alexie's reading of his own memoir, You Don't Have To Say You Love Me. The narration is great; the story is SO PAINFUL that I had to stop reading halfway through. (Alexie had to cancel the book tour because it sent him into a depressive spiral.) He does a great job narrating his YA novel, The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian, which I adored (and I'm not a YA reader).

The last two link to my favorite place to buy digital audiobooks--Libro.fm (No kickbacks.)

Re: Yep! I'm another audio fan. I gravitate towards audio

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Right. Absolutely. And when (like with the Calleshire Chronicles) you have different narrators narrating the same characters you can starkly see what a difference it makes. I think that Robin Bailey actually makes jokes or injects humor into the text by his inflection and speed and tone and the others just don't.

And yes, I won't say how I thought Inspector Maigret was pronounced until I heard it. And that's only French!


I could only find Ruby Dee on that Libro.fm [thank you for the rec of that site. No money to the Bezos!] so I'll probably pass for now. That is one of my favourite books so it might be worth investing and buying it. Maybe Christmas. My library doesn't have it and I couldn't find it bootlegged on youtube.

I will try the Trevor Noah book, too. My library has that. My sons' father is Rwandan. So my kids also have a mixed American-African backgrounds.

Thanks so much for the recs!

[sodium_amytal]

*slams hands on table* You had me at Bronson Pinchot narrating Strangers on a Train. ♥ (He also does Stephen King's 'The Eyes of the Dragon' but rghghgghg high fantasy is just *not* my genre)

Some narrators I've enjoyed: Julia Whelan, Ann Marie Lee, Steven Weber, Jeffrey DeMunn, Michael C. Hall, Craig Wasson, Will Patton, Raul Esparza, James Franco, Joe Mantegna, Cassandra Campbell, Kate Mulgrew, Lindsay Crouse, and Grover Gardner, to name a few.

(Audiobooks are pretty much the only way I actually get to read books now, so I have quite a lot of them xD;; )

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Thanks. Those all sound interesting. I'll check some out.

[potentiality_26]

I don't listen to many audiobooks, but I keep thinking I should give them a try. Will check some of these out!

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Well, you have to want to read the book in the first place. A great voice won't help a book you don't like, but a bad voice (or a mismatched voice) can ruin a book you do like. But when you get a voice you love and a book you like--whee!

[luthien]

I'm in the middle of trying to write a post in response to this challenge, and one of the canons I was intending to rec is Rivers of London. The audiobooks are really, really well done. The main character is a POC, and the reader of the audiobooks is too.

This is what my post will say about them:

Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith are some of the best audiobooks I've encountered. They're murder mystery/police procedural/fantasy, by an author who wrote a few (good) episodes of Doctor Who in the '80s. The main character is Peter Grant, a young mixed race PC in the Met, who winds up apprenticed to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last official wizard in Britain. Holdbrook-Smith brings Peter's first-person narrative to vivid life, but he's also great at voicing the other characters, including Nightingale, whose voice is the polar opposite of Peter's. The first book in the series is, naturally, 'Rivers of London', though it was retitled 'Midnight Riot' for its American release.

So yeah, if you're looking to listen to more audiobooks narrated by POC, I thoroughly recommend these.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I just looked and unfortunately my library doesn't have it in audiobook form. I'll put it on a list to read later in print version. Thanks for the rec.