David A. Howarth

Lesrn how to pronounce words.....

Revisado: 11-18-22

Title says it all. Great material, oddly inept delivery. Narrator mispronoinces fairly common words and well-known proper names.

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Bizarre pronunciation

Revisado: 11-12-22

I'm not sure whether some of the very odd and offputting pronunciations of some words, at times to the point of near-incomprensibility, are due to the narrator's dialect of English or unfamiliarity with particular words. In most cases this problem does not detract from the understanding of the narrative in a serious way, but it's distracting nonetheless. His German pronunciation is also generally atrocious; I cannot speak to his handling of the many brief passages, phrases and names in French and Spanish, but these seem okay to my untrained ear.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

"Chapter"/Story Breaks Bungled

Revisado: 09-23-22

The stories in this collection are superb, having been selected by the late Ms. Le Guin herself as representative of her best "non-genre" (an admittedly arbitrary categorization) work. The narration is very good.

The problem is that this is a collection of short stories, but the chapter breaks inserted by Audible do not in all cases correspond to the beginning of a new story. To locate some stories, one must scrub along through the previous story to the end. The only way I knew to do this was that I have original print copies of both volumes of The Unreal and the Real, and could refer to the Table of Contents in each to determine the order in which the stories occur.

I get that some people don't know the difference between a novel and a story collection, and that of the latter group a large proportion simply read or listen to stories in order, but I'm not one of them and neither should be the Audible curators. We deserve a real Table of Contents on an audiobook, and I hope this shortcoming will be corrected.

Otherwise, this is a great collection.

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esto le resultó útil a 8 personas

Wonderful story given mediocre treatment in audio

Revisado: 08-23-22

The Last Unicorn itself deserves all the praise that can be heaped upon it. It is by turns clever, profound, laugh-out-loud funny, sophisticated, heartfelt, and bittersweet, each of these qualities revealed with a deft precision and panache, perfectly balanced each against the other in a deceptively light style that is perfectly transparent to the casual reader.

It is my favorite book, and I own at least ten copies in various editions. This is apparently the only thing I have in common with the introducer, about whose inane scribblings the less said the better. I could not finish the introduction.

The audiobook narration is, even allowing for my high expectations, a bit disappointing. None of the numerous songs and poems are actually sung or dramatized, as the best narrators seem to do (I am relatively new to audiobooks, but thinking of Rob Inglis' LotR or Stefan Rudnicki's Vance narrations here). This alone might be forgivable, but the narrator also fumbles the delivery of much of the book, routinely emphasizing the wrong words in a sentence, though less often in dialog than in expository passages, almost as though she doesn't quite grasp the meaning. Her range of character voices is narrow, with some being more convincing than others (e.g., her Haggard is pretty good, but her Schmendrick doesn't land quite right, a major problem).

Maybe a thorough pre-reading wasn't done, maybe the direction was sloppy, I dunno and don't feel qualified to guess. What I do know is that the end result doesn't quite gel for this listener. I really wanted it to be great, but as it stands I'm repeatedly jarred out of my immersion in the story by these drawbacks.

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esto le resultó útil a 22 personas