Audio books and narrators

I’m currently listening to The Legend of Drizzt: Collected Stories, by R.A. Salvatore and narrated by quite a list of celebrities. The list includes Felicia Day, Dan Harmon, Greg Grunberg, Tom Felton, Danny Pudi, Sean Astin, Melissa Rauch, Ice-T, Wil Wheaton, Al Yankovic, Michael Chiklis, and David Duchovny. I only recognize maybe two-thirds of the names here, but Binging for pictures suggests I’ve seen nearly all of them somewhere before.

What is perhaps most interesting about this collection, besides the stories themselves (but I won’t review those here), is the evidence that just because someone can deliver lines convincingly as an actor does mean they are good narrators. None of them do a bad job, necessarily, but there’s a definite difference between a good reader and a good narrator. In many cases they sound like they are reading aloud. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just reading aloud can be tricky enough. Odd phrasings can trip you up, and sometimes writers craft sentences that are simply too long to be delivered smoothly and still breathe. As someone who reads aloud to his kids regularly, I know how tough it can be.

But the best narrators not only know how to read the lines smoothly, but endow the words with life beyond their mere meanings. In short, some readers sound like they’re reading the story to you. But some make it seems as though they are telling you the story. The very best make the stories come alive, while completely disappearing from the telling. Sean Astin and Wil Wheaton, for example, are quite excellent narrators. Nothing about their voices pulls you out of the story, either from stumbles with the language (no small task in reading fantasy) or from simply sounding too much like themselves. They inflect their words well, and you get pulled into the story and forget entirely that it’s being read to you.

Most of the books I listen to are read by skilled narrators, so it’s easy to take for granted that everyone who lends their voice to an audiobook will be able to do as well. I have nothing against any of the less-than-skilled readers in this group, but they offer clear evidence that narrating audiobooks is not an easy skill. I now appreciate all the more the talents of narrators like Oliver Wyman, Kate Redding, Michael Kramer, Nick Podehl, and some of the other audiobook regulars.

I’m not finished with the set yet–I’m listening to Wil Wheaton currently, and if you’re expecting “Wesley Crusher’s Story Hour”, think again; Wheaton’s perfomance ranks up there with some of the best. How he manages to do the lich-king and a black dragon without losing his voice for a week I have no idea. I admit to being highly curious how Al Yankovic will do, and whether David Duchovney will manage to not sound like David Duchovney reading abook. Ice-T was an interesting choice–one I’m glad they made. He does a credible job, though his pronouncing the ‘w’ in sword grated, and he effectively challenges what dialects we as accustomed to in our audiobook narration.

It’s a fun set of stories and, while the constantly-changing readers makes it also a interesting study in audiobook narration, I find I’m enjoying the shorter forms after a long stretch of lengthy novels that spin out over days or weeks rather than minutes. But the different readers also give me some ideas as a writer. The stories are all by the same writer, but each reader approaches them so differently I can see how it could be useful to have several different people read your work to you so that you begin to see how well the cadence of your writer fits in other people’s minds and mouths.

But most importantly, it makes quite clear that the difference between a good audiobook and a great one is the narrator. As a writer, you’re putting your words in the hands–and mouth–of someone else who can either make you sound better than you are, or worse. When the time comes for me to select a narrator I intend to choose carefully.