The image is striking...the first time...
I have just, with frustration more than sadness, returned to Audible my purchase of R. A. MacAvoy's Lens of the World. I dearly love the book and was looking forward to listening to the whole series over the next couple weeks of commuting, but I could not cope with the narration.
I did listen to the whole thing first, which I could not have done with some narrators. Lloyd James (Curse of Chalion, dammit, which is another book I love), Gerard Doyle (most of Diana Wynne Jones, dammit twice over), a few others whose names I have mercifully forgotten, start each sentence as though they can't be sure where it's going to end, and frequently hit commas and periods like someone hitting the last step of a staircase either one step sooner or one step later than they expected. The people who have only one sentence melody, the people who speak like a 45 record played at 33*, the ones who read lines of dialogue exactly opposite to the way the text describes them ("Hello!!!" she said drearily) - theirs, I stop, return, and delete after only a couple pages.
Jeremy Arthur isn't one of those. His reading isn't inspired, his ability to distinguish one voice from another is limited and not very graceful, but he's not outright painful to the ears. Unfortunately, he has a positive genius for placing emphasis on the wrong part of a sentence, trampling on parallelisms and wasting all of MacAvoy's deftly turned phrases. Even more unfortunately, he mispronounces a /lot/ of words in ways which are at first confusing and then deeply aggravating. 'Credibly' for 'credibility' is one example I recall. I was reduced to shouting at my dashboard more than once, in spite of all my resolutions to just let it roll off me.
I would have been more amused than anything else by his consistent reading of 'cavalry' as 'Calvary' if only the word didn't occur quite so often in the story.
* Sometimes I enjoy dating myself.**
** We generally split the bill. ***
*** What? It's late, okay?
Edited to correct an unfortunate construction which indicated that I delete readers themselves, which even I - who take such things seriously - would consider rather harsh.
Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.
I did listen to the whole thing first, which I could not have done with some narrators. Lloyd James (Curse of Chalion, dammit, which is another book I love), Gerard Doyle (most of Diana Wynne Jones, dammit twice over), a few others whose names I have mercifully forgotten, start each sentence as though they can't be sure where it's going to end, and frequently hit commas and periods like someone hitting the last step of a staircase either one step sooner or one step later than they expected. The people who have only one sentence melody, the people who speak like a 45 record played at 33*, the ones who read lines of dialogue exactly opposite to the way the text describes them ("Hello!!!" she said drearily) - theirs, I stop, return, and delete after only a couple pages.
Jeremy Arthur isn't one of those. His reading isn't inspired, his ability to distinguish one voice from another is limited and not very graceful, but he's not outright painful to the ears. Unfortunately, he has a positive genius for placing emphasis on the wrong part of a sentence, trampling on parallelisms and wasting all of MacAvoy's deftly turned phrases. Even more unfortunately, he mispronounces a /lot/ of words in ways which are at first confusing and then deeply aggravating. 'Credibly' for 'credibility' is one example I recall. I was reduced to shouting at my dashboard more than once, in spite of all my resolutions to just let it roll off me.
I would have been more amused than anything else by his consistent reading of 'cavalry' as 'Calvary' if only the word didn't occur quite so often in the story.
* Sometimes I enjoy dating myself.**
** We generally split the bill. ***
*** What? It's late, okay?
Edited to correct an unfortunate construction which indicated that I delete readers themselves, which even I - who take such things seriously - would consider rather harsh.
Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.