Matt T.

Characters sound like AI, are an excuse for exposition

Revisado: 08-06-24

Liu’s characters are robotic and relentlessly deliver lectures on physics, relativity or the history of science. Even the police detective does it. You need the voice acting to tell the characters apart. I’m liking the Netflix series more than the novel. Reading this, you can see why the screen writers kept only the basic plot points and use a high degree of artistic liberty.

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So good! Very adept performance of a favorite

Revisado: 05-03-23

Thank you, Ms. Pike! I especially like your reading in the passages of dialogue between Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth. But it’s all very good and natural. I don’t think you could read this way unless you understood and loved the book.

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Impossible to follow the narration

Revisado: 07-08-22

I gave a positive review of Jonathan Davis’ performance of the first book, The Shadow of the Torturer. But this Audible narration is abysmal. I’ve read this book twice at least, but it takes all my attention just to understand what the hell Davis is saying. He systematically mispronounces all the names, both place names and characters’ names. It’s weird because he does this to names that he actually gets right in his reading of shadow of the torturer. But here “Vodalus” becomes unrecognizable when he pronounces it “Vo-DA-lus.” The same with “Gyoll”—in this performance he says “Gee-OLL.” Just two of many examples. I think he must have done this job first, and then someone who listened to this performance spent some time helping him with pronunciations. He mispronounces regular English words. He puts the emphasis in all the wrong places. He does it in a bombastic radio advertising voice. The writing is already esoteric enough that this treatment makes it incomprehensible, even to a fan.

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Narrator worthy of the novel

Revisado: 06-09-22

I’m not reviewing the book, which is a favorite that I’ve read many times and intend to keep re-reading, but the narration. Thank you, Jonathan Davis. Not an easy book to perform but you do it well.

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Glad it exists

Revisado: 06-30-20

I'm re-reading this for maybe the eighth time, but first time by audiobook. Every few years I cycle back through the Book of the New Sun and the Book of the Long Sun--just brilliant, nothing like them. The writing is phenomenal. The narration here is pretty tone deaf; often it's clear that Mr. Davis didn't understand the meaning of a sentence he's reading and put the emphasis in the wrong place. Or he didn't know a word, like "theodicy," and mispronounces it, so you might think it's a Wolfeism or archaic term you didn't know, if you didn't have the text to refer to. Even so, the narration here is about one thousand times better than the audiobook for The Knight and The Wizard. Glad I'm able to listen to this during my commute, since I don't have as much time to read now.

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Great book but robotic, distracting narration

Revisado: 08-25-19

I love this book. I've read it at least four times in print and now I'm on my second listen. I'm braving the Audible version again only because the audiobook format is so convenient, and I have more time to listen (while driving to work or doing dishes or laundry) than to read. The narration is so bad it's puzzling. At first I thought it was a text-to-speech program, but the narrator occasionally tries out different accents for different characters. The pronunciation of the names is consistently bad. The one that I have the hardest time ignoring is Kulili, the goddess of Aelfrice, which the narrator consistently pronounces "Koo Loo Lee." The word "stripling," which Berthold uses to refer to Able, he pronounces "strapling." But the worst part is that the narrator apparently doesn't understand what he's reading. Able's style is colloquial, simple American English, not literary. The narrator will often stress the wrong word in a sentence, changing it to nonsense. If I had not already read the book several times, I would be completely thrown off by this. Wolfe's writing, although extremely rewarding, is difficult enough without this added layer of misdirection in the reading. Sorry, Mr. Bittner, but I wish you had more feeling for the text.

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