The Keep by Jennifer Egan Read by Jeff Gurner & Geneva Carr (listened 11/2009)
Two boys that grew up together, Howard and Danny, cousins—sort of, meet up in the U.K. as adults for a potential business venture at a castle. Danny is filled with guilt about what he did to Howard when they were kids and worries if Howard is going to bring the incident up. Read the rest of this entry »
I was reading some of the discussion by the Amazon Audio Book Community and smiled at some of the conclusions drawn about authors that read their own books. In essence, not a good decision.
As an audio book veteran listener, I have on a couple of occasions purchased audio books read by the author. The first time it was one of those psychological type books and I didn’t give it a second thought. However, after the third chapter of listening, I was exhausted and had to turn it off. I won’t mention the book but the topic was interesting, but the narration was very monotone—I have never finished that book. The other one was a novel with a Christmas setting. The story itself was well, somewhat entertaining but the author and her sister author narrated. What I can say is that authorship and voice acting are not synonymous.
That said, there are exceptions. The Audies 2009 Finalists demonstrate this for authors/narrators: Neil Gaiman, Augusten Burroughs, Carrington MacDuffie and a few more. Perhaps I’ll listen to one of these, authors/narrators, and hear what was missing from my prior experience.
What has been your experience with authors narrating their own works?
Through a Glass Darkly by Donna Leon Read Read by David Colacci (listened 10/2009)
The story starts with a friend asking a friend to get Marco Ribetti out of jail after a protest and of course there’s more but it’s lost in the extremely detailed narrative. For me, there was too much extraneous banter. This book talks about every detail of the characters except for a sneeze and wipe. Read the rest of this entry »
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