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The chapter titles are off by one

Revisado: 12-11-24

Also, the narrator’s voice is monotonous in a way that suggests it might’ve been AI generated

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Interesting facts surrounded by wordy slush

Revisado: 10-14-24

Some of what I learned here was interesting. Most of it however (in terms of word count) was dreary, repetitive, (AI-generated?) slush. My goodness was it annoying. It made me lose respect for the Audible brand.

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Bad audio quality

Revisado: 12-22-23

There was no attempt whatsoever to have the audio snippets match the pace or sound level of the main narration. What’s worse is the fact that there’s a ton of background noise in many of them, and the sound quality of the speaker is also really bad. Just all in all, a really low quality audiobook product.

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yikes

Revisado: 03-24-23

I realize these stories are quite old, but even so, story #2 comes off as incredibly racist -- there's never any need to "ching-chong", even if you're trying to poke fun at the protagonist. There are simply smarter ways to achieve the same effect.

The other stories were mostly fine.

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narrator needs to learn French

Revisado: 10-01-22

I thought this about the These Violent Delights books too, but if you use French phrases in your text, you should get a narrator who can pronounce French words. (Or at least, who can practice with the Google Translate text to speech tool until they get it close enough.) Similarly, she also mispronounced a few tones in the Mandarin phrases, though luckily not as badly as she butchered the French.

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story is fine, but narration was... not great

Revisado: 09-19-22

A new pet peeve I discovered from listening to this audiobook: I hate it when "2021" is pronounced "two thousand twenty-one", when colloquially, it should be pronounced "twenty twenty-one". The more I heard it, the more annoyed I felt... and alas, there were SO many dates from 2021. Definitely an unexpected distraction from the listening experience.

Also, just generally, I didn't find this particular narrator to be a great fit for a memoir or work of nonfiction, even though I've enjoyed her fiction narrations.

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Great narration, except a tiny detail

Revisado: 02-12-22

I think the narrator is very talented and brought depth and emotion to the story. His pronunciation for all the Mandarin was also on point, with a perfect Taiwanese accent, except ... I just cannot understand how you'd pronounce everything else right, EXCEPT the main character's name. "Zhou" can be pronounced "Joe" in a northern Chinese accent or "Zoh" in a southern Chinese (or Taiwanese) accent, but why would you butcher it by pronouncing it "Zow"? Especially when you've demonstrated you can pronounce Mandarin just fine? It was just so jarring to hear that throughout the whole book.

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mediocre narration

Revisado: 06-18-21

Usually, in a print book, within a chapter, if the text suddenly changes topic, you would see a taller line break, or perhaps 3 asterisks. This indicates that the author is about to switch to a different story, and preps your mind accordingly. (Since I've never read the print edition of this book, I can only guess.)

Similarly, I would expect an audiobook, at that exact same place in the text, there would be a longer pause, to indicate that a topic change is coming up. But alas, that did not happen. So the narration -- which was already breathy and of mediocre quality -- sometimes comes across as a long, run-on sentence. I found myself rewinding the book frequently, because to my surprise, the author had jumped to a completely different topic in the past 30 seconds, without my notice.

As for the actual audiobook content, it's alright, I guess. It's not my favorite non-fiction book, but there are some interesting anecdotes here and there of historically famous swindles.

TL;DR 1) I wish the audio engineer had left more pauses between the topic changes within each chapter. 2) I wish the author had gone with a professional narrator, instead of trying to narrate it herself.

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the narration isn't great

Revisado: 01-05-21

The words sounded professional but the narration? Not so much. Had the author decided to let someone else narrate his book, instead of trying to do so himself, I probably would've liked the book way more.

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poorly translated

Revisado: 02-17-19

this book felt like it went through Google Translate, without even a human, French-speaking proofreader afterwards

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