Happy Thursday, audiophiles!
Whatchyall listening to? I powered through The Favorite Sister, a book by Jessica Knoll, the author of The Luckiest Girl Alive. I enjoyed The Luckiest Girl Alive but I couldn’t stop listening to The Favorite Sister. When I read the summary I, like a judgemental dum-dum, assumed that because it had something to do with reality television it would be like reality television itself: a fairly shallow guilty pleasure (no judgment about shallow guilty pleasures, I have approximately 769,928 of my own).
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Anyway, I really enjoyed The Favorite Sister. It’s a dark, funny, surprising thriller that I think fans of Megan Abbott (The Fever, Dare Me, etc.) would really enjoy. The audiobook has three different narrators–-and while one of the voices kind of bugged me at first, I appreciated the distinction among the three voices because the different personalities and voices (both literally in the audiobook and figuratively in the novel as a whole) really shape the trajectory of the plot. If you give it a listen, hit me up at katie@riotnewmedia.com or twitter at msmacb and let me know what you think!
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Thanks to all who wrote in sharing their favorite celebrity narrators! Here are just a few of your many, many comments and suggestions.
Tara reached out on twitter to say that her favorite celebrity narrator is “Santino Fontana doing Carolyn Kepnes’ You and Hidden Bodies. Just amazing.” Fontana has many talents and I know he’s narrated a few audiobooks but for any readers who might be unfamiliar, he also played Greg on the first few seasons of My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a character whose departure from the series I’m definitely still not over. That said, it sounds like Santino makes a 180 degree shift character-wise in narrating You and Hidden Bodies, as his character, Joe, is described as “charmingly sociopathic” (the title of the latter may give you an idea of some of the results of Joe’s sociopathic tendencies).
Sonya says her favorite celebrity narrator is James Marsters reading Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series.
Lisa just finished listening to The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty, narrated by Elizabeth McGovern and says “it was fantastic!”
Sarah recommends, “Cosmos by Carl Sagan, with an intro by Sagan read by Seth Macfarlane and the body read by LeVar Burton. And, yep, LeVar narrates about how you expect; I have no idea how that man can be so awed by every word that comes out of his face, but he is and it’s infectious!
Juliet Stevenson, who has been in tons of movies and shows, but who I will always remember as Kiera Knightly’s awesomely insane mother in Bend It Like Beckham, has an extensive library of narrations. My favorites are classics: Middlemarch, multiple Jane Austen, Jane Eyre…but her more contemporary titles, like Kate DiCamillo’s The Magician’s Elephant are excellent as well.
She also recommends Edward Hermann’s narrations of “hulking long histories like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit make the minutes fly by.”
Sarah knows a thing or two about audiobooks with celebrity narrators and she has a boatload more celebrity narrator recommendations:
- “Matilda by Roald Dahl, narrated by Kate Winslet (and you can just tell she had a blast doing it)
- A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, narrated by Jason Isaacs (insert Lucius Malfoy joke here)
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, narrated by Michael C Hall
- Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, narrated by Dustin Hoffman
- Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, narrated by John Malkovich
- Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley, narrated by Michael Boatman
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, narrated by Parker Posey”
PARKER POSEY NARRATES THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, Y’ALL! How I have lived my whole life without knowing that, much less listening to it at least 3 times a month, I don’t know but it’s a mistake I need to rectify ASAP.
Book Riot Audiobook Posts You May Have Missed:
Rioter Anna Cramer explores the question: can a good audiobook make running less terrible? She says, “ “Confession: I hate running. I mean I really hate it. I try to run at least 3 times a week anywhere from 2 to 10 miles (let’s be honest, the 10-miler happened once) and without fail, I end up hating pretty much hating every mile. Each mile sucks. Every mile is hard. But, as Nike’s motto goes, I just do it. Could a bomb a** book on tape save me?”
I mentioned how much I loved having multiple narrators in The Favorite Sister and Rioter Christine Hoxmeier is also a big fan of multiple narrators. She says. “One of the great joys of listening to audiobooks is discovering titles that are well suited to the format. Perhaps it’s a narrator who can take on each character with a different and unique voice, or the production gives it a radio play quality (like the new Star Wars books), and sometimes it’s the fact that a book with several POVs decides to actually use multiple narrators. What a thought! These are some great and enjoyable YA books in their own right, but when consumed in audible form, the story and characters are enhanced by the use of audiobooks with multiple narrators.”
Too many audiobooks, too little time, right? Here are 20 Things to do while listening to Audiobooks that aren’t chores: https://bookriot.com/2018/05/02/things-to-do-while-listening-to-audiobooks/
Finally, this isn’t from Book Riot but is interesting nonetheless. Mental Floss has some behind the scenes secrets of audiobook narrators. Check them out here.
Until next week,
~Katie