{"id":13490,"date":"2014-07-09T06:30:53","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T10:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=13490"},"modified":"2014-07-09T06:30:53","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T10:30:53","slug":"lend-us-your-ears-what-shall-we-listen-to-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=13490","title":{"rendered":"Lend Us Your Ears: What Shall We Listen to Next?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"golden<\/a>I love a compelling audiobook. I’m a sucker especially for male British narrators (bonus points if they are named Simon), followed closely by female British narrators and Lenny Henry (who actually is a male British narrator but does other accents so beautifully he gets his own category). Any narrator not in one of those three rubrics is assessed on a case-by-case basis.
\nI must be an aural learner, because I can recall even more detail when I’ve listened to a book than I can when I’ve read it. I wouldn’t ever choose to give up reading with my eyes \u2014 it’s hard to skim over passages of exposition in an audiobook, for one thing, and it’s a lot more difficult to locate lines you heard earlier and loved \u2014 but the pleasure of hearing someone tell a story well never gets old. We are a storytelling species, after all.
\nHere\u2019s when I choose an audiobook over the printed page:
\n1) When I drive. (People frown upon actual reading, even\u2014most unfairly!\u2014at stoplights.)
\n2) When I\u2019ve given up on a book that people I trust absolutely love. Years ago, I tried three times to read\u00a0The Shipping News<\/em>, to no avail. The staccato opening and description of the schlumpy main character left me cold. But enough of my like-minded book friends had raved about this one that finally I tried it on audio, and I’m glad I did.\u00a0The Shipping News<\/em>\u00a0remains one of the most riveting book experiences I\u2019ve ever had, and I can still feel the icy Newfoundland waters.
\n\"the-tale-of-despereaux-9781400099139-lg\"<\/a>3) When I\u2019ve read and loved a book and want to re-read it again, but don\u2019t have time because I have stacks and stacks of galleys staring me down. I\u2019ve ‘re-read’ (via audio) The\u00a0Book Thief<\/em>,\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Hunger Games<\/em>,\u00a0The Tale of Despereaux<\/em>,\u00a0The Golden Compass<\/em>, all of the Harry Potter books,\u00a0The Great Gilly Hopkins,\u00a0<\/em>and many more. It’s guilt-free re-reading! Woot!
\n4) When I need to read a book that everyone and his brother is talking about, but I can’t seem to bring myself to pick it up. This is different from #2, where I actually have attempted to read the book and given up. Here, I can’t even look the thing in the eye but feel I absolutely MUST familiarize myself with the contents. I will not reveal any of those titles here, for obvious reasons.
\nI\u2019m an unabridged kind of girl. When books aren\u2019t available unabridged, I don\u2019t even bother ordering them for the store. If whatever\u2019s been cut doesn\u2019t make a difference to the book, it shouldn\u2019t have been there in the first place. If it does make a difference, well, I\u2019m going to be obsessed wondering what I\u2019m missing. Unabridged is the only way to go, although it can mean a lengthy commitment. (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell<\/em>, I’m looking at you.)
\nLately, I can’t tell if more or fewer books are being turned into audiobooks. The number of books on CD certainly seems to have diminished with the advent of digital downloading. This makes it harder for the bookstore to stock a rich mix of options for travelers, and I miss the golden age of lower-priced unabridged audiobooks we enjoyed not too many years ago. I also used to sell a lot of audiobooks with their printed counterparts to parents whose kids struggle with reading; having a child listen along while reading can help cement some of the sight words and help make meaning of a story.
\n\"grave<\/a>I’m not sure how publishers decide which titles to develop on audio for mainstream consumers and which ones they aim primarily at library markets. There are titles that do exist on CD, but are only available at the kinds of astronomical prices clearly intended for library multi-use licenses. For example, we would love to stock R.L. LaFevers’ fabulous\u00a0Grave Mercy\u00a0<\/em>on CD, but customers are unlikely to shell out $108.75 for it.
\nAudiobook Pet Peeves:
\n1) Narrators sometimes just don’t appeal to a listener’s ear. This is so subjective, isn’t it? Once I had an audiobook of Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses<\/em> roaming the floor of my car for months. I had tried it and could not stand the narration style, so I abandoned it after about 20 minutes of listening. But the story kept nagging the back of my brain, so several weeks later I popped it in again, and this time, I absolutely loved it. Same narrator, same book, different mood. Weird.
\n2) Sometimes I find actor-narrrators too actor-y. I admit I had a really hard time with Brendan Fraser and the Inkheart series. His made-up voices were almost painful to hear; to my ear, many of them sounded self-conscious and overly cute. And yet, Cornelia Funke told him she\u2019d created the character of Meggie\u2019s father specifically for him. And some of our customers loved those recordings. So it’s very individual. And it’s not the ‘bigness’ of acting that’s the problem; many actors bring their performance chops to a piece without distracting from the story itself. Lenny Henry’s reading of Anansi Boys<\/em> remains one of my all-time favorites, and his performance is big.
\n3) Narrators sometimes get things wrong. In The House of Sand and Fog<\/em>, the narrator mispronounces a Spanish street name in California, and as a listener who had lived there, the error rudely booted me out of the story. I missed two whole chapters, so sidetracked was I by thoughts of whether audio recording artists have style sheets that indicate correct pronunciations of names and places, and if so, how this street name got overlooked. It’s never good to get bounced out of a story.
\n\"ocean<\/a>I loved Jennifer Meyers’ narration of The Orchid Thief<\/em>, and Hope Davis’s A Northern Light<\/em>, and Jeff Woodman’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil<\/em>. Philip Pullman’s narration in The Golden Compass<\/em> is utterly riveting, as is Neil Gaiman’s reading of The Ocean at the End of the Lane<\/em>.
\nI am craving some fantastic new listens, especially those on CD that I might carry in the store for my customers.
\nWhat children’s and YA books have you heard on audio lately that you highly recommend?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Searching for that next perfect listen….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}