Dani Smith

Very fun nerdy journalism, great voice

Revisado: 08-01-22

I love Mary Roach’s work and how she gets deeply nerdy about every topic she covers. She’s definitely on my “fantasy celebrity dinner party” list. She reads her own work well, which isn’t always true of authors as narrators.
My only complaint is that, given her name, you’d think she would have mentioned human/cockroach conflicts more than once ;)

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Good story, not the right voice

Revisado: 07-08-22

The narrator isn’t terrible but I think I’d enjoy her voice in a fantasy story with fewer zombies. Seems like an older woman narrator might have given the sinister and adult themes a bit more gravity. It’s so disruptive to the suspension of disbelief when I’m jarred by the narrator trying unconvincingly to pitch her voice low for a male character.

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Touching, painful and important

Revisado: 07-23-18

Everything Ta-Nehisi Coates writes reads like poetry, whether it's a news article or prose. Written to his son, it feels so personal, as if I were pressing my ear up against the door while they were having "the talk" on the other side. Listening to it in his own voice felt like I was scratching the surface of a lived experience of blackness, and it gave me a deeper appreciation of what my responsibility is as "someone who believes they are white", as Coates refers to us, to dismantle whiteness. This is not written for us, but I think it's so important for us to hear.

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Great listen, worth the 13 hours!

Revisado: 04-07-18

While I've long admired Justice Ginsburg, it was wonderful and inspiring to hear her account of her achievements and the advancement of women in US legal history. Hearing her voice from lectures and court opinion announcements is so nice, as she's got the perfect cadence for a judge - a clear, even, and patient style of speaking. The story is long, but worth the time.
My only complaint in content is that the list at the end of her new pop culture stardom does not include her counterpart on Saturday Night Live ("ya got Ginsburned!" Isn't worth a mention?), and my only storytelling complaint is that there's a bit pronoun disagreement, jumping between describing RBG in third person and using "I" which may be clearer in the written text if her essays are set apart in some way, but causes some confusion while listening. Neither of these is worth docking a star, because I enjoyed this book so much!

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Great stories, with weird race/gender cultural artifacts

Revisado: 01-21-18

I'm often torn, as an avid reader and a social justice warrior when reading old books Thad aren't the product of early activists, as each eerie remnant of overt racism, sexism, and classism makes me cringe. A product of his times ACD may be, but he also appears to bear a strong respect for logic and reason, which ought to lead him away from silly prejudice, as it did other more radical-seeming authors of his time, and before it.
The stories, ultimately, are entertaining and classic, and Stephen Fry's combined talent and clear love for the stories shows in a great telling.

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Familiar story for non-Appalachian poor too

Revisado: 07-31-17

This was a really nice, heartfelt book read by the author about his experiences growing up in a culture which owns poverty, and the outsider feelings that come from both within and without that culture when you rise above your circumstances. The story resonated with me, from thinking his sister's ability to have a healthy and happy marriage was a miracle, to the complex feelings around what it means to support family members who are still mired in poverty and drug abuse when you yourself are free of them. As a kid who grew up with a struggling single mother and a homeless addict father, a lot of this was familiar, even though I'm on the West Coast rather than in Appalachia. Hearing about someone else's experience made me re-examine my own, and heal a little bit more.

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Fine story, not the best narrator

Revisado: 07-06-17

The story was a satisfying addition to the series, there’s definitely a rewarding continuation of the characters I know and love. But there are way too many instances when I want to ask Garth Nix to “show me don’t tell me” - too many overt references to past books, and the necessary details like the naming of the bells isn’t woven in very elegantly this time around.
The narrator has a very unnatural sounding cadence and intonation, and a distractingly bad “man” voice. It’s forced and uncomfortable. It’s like hearing a man go very high pitched to imitate a little girl in place of an adult woman (which neither of the two male Old Kingdom series narrators did, btw).

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Detailed to the point of immersion

Revisado: 01-17-17

On the second read of this book, I kept thinking: this book must have been painstakingly researched. It's so thorough in detail (and is set in a not-so-distant future) that you feel like it could be real. Great storytelling. Great narrator (he really captured Watney's snark).

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Great story, great telling

Revisado: 12-26-16

Margaret Atwood has been my favorite author since I read The Handmaid's Tale in high school lit, and she did not disappoint in this series. She's so good at bringing mindfulness to existing ills in the world by showing what their worst manifestations might be.
I like how the latter half of the book(ish) is written like a story that someone is telling verbally or in a journal, and I like that in the narration each of the characters telling a story has their own voice. It's a lot of fun to listen to - with the Crakers much more present in this story than the other two, it's also the funniest of the three.

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Great story, inconsistent narration style

Revisado: 08-28-15

This is an epic tale, no doubt about it. It's thoroughly engaging for all 20+ hours, which is pretty impressive - that's a lot of book! Finishing it with a resolution but also many questions was satisfying, but also made me ask "done with that, where's the sequel???"

The problem with the narration style is a bit annoying. Some chapters have a full cast of narrators to play out all the dialogue, while in others the narrator speaks all the dialogue, including for some people who have other voices in other chapters. All the narrators have good voices (well, the Shadout Mapes doesn't have my favorite voice, an intentionally squeaky style, like she's trying to imitate someone who's inhaled helium), but it would have been better if they just picked one - always the full cast, or always the main narrator.

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