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« on: January 17, 2015, 01:29:08 am »
I have come to embrace audiobooks completely -- to a large extent because it's the only reliable way for me to get my fiction fix. There are good audiobooks and bad, true. In my own case, though, I find that, with good audiobooks, I go with it, because they're good; and with bad audiobooks, I kind of listen 'through' the narrator, bypassing him/her.
In most cases, though, I find that I end up liking even narrators I didn't originally take to. Last summer I started the epic project of listening to the entire Wheel of Time series, and at first I didn't like the narrators -- American, when I always prefer English narrators for fantasy, and just not voices I got into at first. But after umpteen thousand hours of listening, I've come to like them. The fact that they have a man narrating the male pov sections and a woman narrating the woman pov sections is actually pretty great, even though it introduces all sorts of problem (voices sound different, names are pronounced differently, etc). All those problems, though, have smoothed out for me, so I hardly notice them and they don't bother me.
Anyway... Maybe the best narrator I've heard (that I can remember, anyway) is the guy who does Martin's books. (Well, all except Feast for Crows.) I forget his name, but he's amazing. Especially by the second and third books, when he's really hit his stride in terms of voices and characterizations. For instance, he gave Tyrion a very distinct accent, and at least in later books, he has Jaime speak in a way that is very similar only much less pronounced. It's quite subtle, if I remember right, yet it was clearly a conscious decision. Really impressive.
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