I picked up Expeditionary Force book 6 and I am SOOO glad I got the audio book version! The narrator R. C. Bray is excellent! He really brings the characters to life and feels like you are listening to a full cast production at times. The writing can be silly at times, but damn If I don’t laugh out loud despite that. and Skippy and his antics will be something I will remember to my rocking chair days and chuckle at. The audio version actually makes the series BETTER! :)
Which makes me think, any other series other there where the narrator really brings the book to life and makes it better than what you create in your head reading it?
And I ran across these books last month and couldn’t do much else but listen until they were done, the reader was not one I had run across before, Doug Tisdale, Jr., but he really brought these books to life. Starts slow but builds pretty quickly, plenty of interesting world-building, lots of amusing satire of modern obsessions in a fantasy context. I think satire is very hard to pull off, but Pike nails it.
I agree that Bray brings a level of quality that actually elevates the otherwise-merely-good writing of the Expeditionary Force books. I continue listening to them mostly because his narration is so good.
It’s kind of funny: I was out of Audible credits last month and they/Amazon had sent me a $5 coupon to use on a Daily Deal book. I waited a few days and nothing really appealed to me. Finally, a dumb-looking book titled “Space Knight” was on the Daily Deal. This jacket-description and especially the cover art just screamed “CHEESE” at top volume, but the reviews were apparently all stellar – the book had gotten about seventeen hundred reviews and it was at 4.5 stars. So I took the plunge.
Well, as I should have realized and/or remembered, Amazon splits their reviews into three parts: Overall, Performance, and Story. Everyone reviewing the book gave the narrator (Performance) the full five-stars. Like, almost 100% of the respondents. But many gave the Story score a single star… apparently because they couldn’t give it zero stars. Somehow, Audible’s rating scale took the glowing reviews for the narrator and decided that was the primary metric, eclipsing all others.
And the narrator - Nick Podehl - is spectacular. He also narrated the excellent version of Name of the Wind, and This Book is Full of Spiders (which he also enhanced).
However, Podehl’s narration was not enough to save Space Knight, which was the worst kind of RPGLit drek imaginable. I am very bitter that I wasted my $5 coupon on that “book”.
Back on topic, I think that Kate Mulgrew (of ST: Voyager fame) does an absolutely magnificent job narrating Joe Hill’s already-great book N0S4A2.
:) And for a different opinion, I disliked it enough that I won’t listen to another Kate Mulgrew narration (though I did like the book.) :P It’s obviously a matter of taste, but I don’t like raspy-voiced narrators, and I didn’t really like Mulgrew’s character voices. It actually might be instructive to have a “disliked Audiobook narrators” thread, or subthread.
I just got through with this whole series (minus the novelettes) I like it quite a bit, the narrator was good, not R. C. Bray good but that’s what makes him unique. thanks for the other recommendations! Adding them to my audio list.
Carrying over from @Bardolph post in the Greatest Voice Acting Performances thread. Brian Blessed is starring as Gotrek (from Warhammer’s Gotrek and Felix) in a 4 hour Audio Drama (with full cast supporting him) coming out tomorrow:
OK, I don’t want this to come across all shill-y, 'cause I done already been paid for these, I just thought they were AWESOME and have been having a hell of a good time with my narration slate lately.
Will Wight’s Cradle series (Unsouled/ect) is just kickass. The closest analog I can think of is Last Airbender, but it’s very much its own thing. Second one just came out, third one is in the can (and is my favorite so far), 2 more already written, and he’s still writing them. He’s got some pretty passionate fans.
Death Rites - which starts pretty Dresden and then starts to fork off in its own direction about halfway through and was a bunch of fun to do.
And THIS friggin’ book which I loved to pieces and comes out from Tor in a couple of weeks -
It’s like, I don’t know, Pitch Black + Outland + something else cool?
And if you want to hear what it sounds like when I’m getting drunk, well, here you go.
I’m been listening to this, and the chapters on the 64% rule (Al’s contention that Republicans and Democrats agree 64% of the time) and on his friendship with Republicans were really illuminating. The whole book in general is just so good, but the chapters I’m listening to now about his actual work in the actual Senate are just really informative.
Audible is offering 6 months at 9.95 a month. I can’t resist that, even though I currently have a huge audible backlog.
I’m currently making my way through Obama’s latest book. He narrates it himself and he does a good job. It’s not just a plain reading. He really gets into it. It’s like listening to him talk about his life and then campaign and eventually the first term of his Presidency. Recommended.
Damn, I just put a recommendation for Lies of Locke Lamora on another thread. 1st book of the Gentleman Bastards series.
And yeah, I have Obama’s book in my library too.
[edit] - so to keep this on the audiobook thread, I’ll say again that The Lies of Locke Lamora is fantastic. The narrator acts out each character’s voice distinctly, even when certain characters are pretending to be others, and he holds your attention. The downside I learned in the other “ebook bargains” thread is that the author has apparently decided to retire after writing his 3rd book in a series of 6 or 7 so it seems that we’re probably stuck with a trilogy. I’m not far enough along to know if we’re left hanging…but I did buy the first three audiobooks.
I am currently listening to Priest of Bones which is like a Fantasy version of Peaky Blinders. I think it may be the authors first book because there are some phrases that get repeated a bit but so far the narrator is making it very enjoyable (John Lee). I am about 50% through the story.
I am also listening to a lot of their Plus stuff and mainly listening to mysteries by Catherine Aird. They are small listens of about 5 hours each of British Mysteries that I like. MC is a detective in a small town/county setting. The plots are pretty good for a series of this type and I kind of think of them as a police/cozy mystery (The Calleshire Chronicles).
Note: The older books were a little hard to understand as the main narrator was one of the judges on Rumpole of the Baily show (actor is Robin Bailey - I suspect it is more the audio quality than the actor). I like the newer narrator a bit more Derek Perkins.
The Royal Spyness series is excellent Rhys Bowen with the original Narrator Katherine Kellgren (who unfortunately passed away).
I also enjoyed Prime Suspects: A Clone Detective Mystery.
And Thus Spoke Zarathustra has a audiobook is pretty good. Nitzche poetry style mid distance from philosophy for assholes fit very well with the audio format, probably better than text.
I’m currently listening to Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘Ambergris’ books- the collected set was on sale on Audible for $8 (and I think it says it’s 35 hours for the 3 books- a crazy value). I previously read the first and third in the series, ‘The City of Saits and Madmen’ and ‘Finch’, but I only vaguely remember them. Each book is narrated by a different actor- the first by Bronson Pinchot, one of Hollywood’s ‘oh yeah, That Guy’ actors.
I’ve just finished the second story in the first book and man, he does a crazy thing I’ve never heard before in the audiobook thing- he kind of embodies the character, and almost acts it out with his voice. The story is a written history/guidebook/lecture of this fantasy city as set forth by a bored, cynical, middle-aged professor who’s been roped into the project for unspecified (probably financial- ie, just collecting a paycheck) reasons. And man, Pinchot makes you feel all the contempt the fictional author of this guidebook has in his soul- for his audience, employer, peers in academia, etc. It’s a little distracting at first, and then kind of amazing and hilarious once you start to get it.
I could swear I recommended this before, but search is showing nothing.
Circe is hands down the best pairing of novel and voice actor I’ve come across. It is fundamentally a reframing of the Odyssey from the lesser Titan’s perspective, and if that’s all it were, I would equally recommend Madeline Miller’s first novel, The Song of Achilles; but with the benefit of several millennia of narrative technique and an actor with the voice of a goddess, this is a reimagining that does for Greek mythology what the REmakes did for Resident Evil.
