Anonymous wrote:The narrator matters at least as much as the author for audio books. You have to listen to the samples before buying

+1

I read almost exclusively via audible. I love audiobooks.

The narrator is 100% performing and I love it.

Rebecca Lowman reading Rules of Civility
Sissy Spacek reading To Kill a Mockingbird
Neil Patrick Harris reading Henry Huggins

Anonymous wrote:I love audiobooks -- there are definitely better narrators and not so great ones.

I LOVED Tom Hanks narrating The Dutch House by Ann Patchet. Great story -- wonderful narrating!!

Ugh I hated this performance. But to me Tom hanks only ever sounds like Tom hanks, so I didn’t get a good picture in my mind of the character beyond Tom Hanks.

Anonymous wrote:I listen to tons of audiobooks but have to go 2x speed or I hate every narrator.

I love audiobooks too and speed up the narration as well. The narrators don’t generally bother me, but I think most speak way to slowly.

Always preview.

I listen to tons of audiobooks but have to go 2x speed or I hate every narrator.

Anonymous wrote:The narrator matters at least as much as the author for audio books. You have to listen to the samples before buying

This, 100%. The woman who did "The Push" was amazing.

I actually hate both podcasts and audiobooks. For similar reasons.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Which ones didn’t you like?

The Fever by Megan Abbott
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley

Some voices are grating. Try other narrators. You can listen to samples before buying.

Apples Never Fall
Project Hail Mary
American Dirt
Unbroken

Love podcasts. Love non-fiction audiobooks. I CANNOT do fiction on audio. It’s just terrible. Never realized how much I make up voices for characters in my head when I read.

Narration can be hit or miss! Sometimes the narrator
is so good at getting different voices, I don’t even notice after a while if it’s man doing a woman’s voice or vice versa.

Non-fiction where there isn’t a lot of dialogue just is a question of whether you like the reader. I also loved Patrick Raddon Keefe’s reading of Say Nothing! The northern Irish accent is lovely to me. I always read reviews carefully to see what people say about the narrator and you can listen to a sample on audible before buying. You can also search for narrators you like since they sometimes read similar authors or series. Good luck!

The narrator matters at least as much as the author for audio books. You have to listen to the samples before buying

I love audiobooks -- there are definitely better narrators and not so great ones.

I LOVED Tom Hanks narrating The Dutch House by Ann Patchet. Great story -- wonderful narrating!!

Anonymous wrote:Which ones didn’t you like?

The Fever by Megan Abbott
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley

Which ones didn’t you like?

So I recently started trying to listen to audiobooks, as I was burning through podcasts too fast. However, I'm finding that I'm really disliking them, for the most part, and I think it's because of the narration, as opposed to the content. The only one I've liked thus far is Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. I think that was okay because it was non-fiction and the narrator had a nice accent. For the fiction I've tried the narration -which is really more like voice acting- is just so cringe I can't get into the story... Does this happen to anyone else? Am I just picking duds or is it time to give up and go back to podcasts?