Be Excellent To Each Other

Over the past few months I have been ravenously devouring the Dresden Files audiobooks during my drive to work and back home. I've just started the last one and need new recommendations (despite my current temporary bus wanker status).

Any suggestions? I warn thee, I have been spoilt by James Marsters' awesome Dresden portrayal and the pretty good reader of the latest Fitz the Assassin book. I need quality stuffs.

I think I've only listened to one adult audiobook, and that was I Alan Partridge. Which was truly excellent, and fairly exceptional given it's read in character.

Other than that, we're listening to a lot of the Roald Dahl stories. Brilliant, but not what you're after unless you have kids in the car.

HTH!

Serial?

Radio's got USB or bluetooth

I'll second the Partridge audio book. Superb.

:sigh:

viewtopic.php?p=866425#p866425

Ah, I see. And I was joking

It's not strictly an audio book, more of an play but the audio book of "World War Z" is excellent, including the vocal talents of Alan Alda, Nathan Fillion, Mark Hammill and Henry Rollins

I'll check it out, ta.

I don't know if you would like them but I love
PG Wodehouse audiobooks read by Jonathan Cecil (particularly Jeeves and Wooster books and uncle fred books)
Dr Who audiobooks read by David Tennant (not (just) because he's my fav doctor, but because he does all different voices for the characters)
Hitchhikers guide read by Douglas Adams (short but lovely)

I do much prefer the radio series but anything by Adams is great (and his voice really works for all the different characters).
There are also radio series of the later books (Dirk Maggs put those out and they have the Adams audio from his readings as Agrajag) , while we're on the subject of Radio plays the Neil Gaiman BBC stuff like Good Omens / Neverwhere are also worth a listen.

My other go to for this would be anything Discworld , the early ones are mainly read by Nigel Planer (who does a very good Rincewind) but the later ones are all by Stephen Briggs (who adapted a number of the books for the stage).

thanks zaphod, I will also look for those

Discworld!

Of course!

Discworld. I was listening to The Light Fantastic this morning and the Shopkeeper has a stereotypical 'jewish' accent. Awkward.

The Audio version of it will have been recorded not that long after the book (I remember having it from our local library on something like 12 cassettes and then taking them on long journeys) - so it will easily be 25+ years old.

Hmmm - the only thing I can find about date is the info here :

http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/3811/

Which has it as 1997 but i'm assuming thats the CD version and the cassette stuff pre-dates that.

Understandable, but still quite jarring.

The recording I have still has the "End of Side 4, please move to Side 5" announcements in it, so you're probably spot on.

There's a 1986 copyright there. Would that be the book copyright?

I have no idea if this is any good but as it's free (until November) it's probably worth a punt. Like the World War Z adaptation it's a full cast recording.

#publisher-summary">http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/FREE- ... er-summary

Yeah thats the book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_Fantastic

I do remember getting audio books from the library when I was a kid - although the first Pratchett ones I remember listening to would have been the late 90's early 2000's (which ties in with the ISIS date)

The radio play versions are awesome. Guards! Guards! in particular was a superb adaptation.

I believe Nigel Planer only did the first few. He's very good though. Quite suited to the material.

You have :

Early unabridged versions , these are by ISIS https://www.isis-publishing.co.uk/ in the UK and have either Nigel Planer or Celia Imrie (for the Witches books)
The later ones are all read by Stephen Briggs (who also adapted a number of the books for the stage) - I think the break is somewhere around The Fifth Elephant

There are also abridged versions of the books which are read by Tony Robinson , when I got those they were on tape so instead of the 8 , 10 , 12 cassettes in the unabridged books these were normally 2 cassettes (so around 3 hours or so in length) - looking on Audible he's continued to do those right up till the last one (http://www.audible.com.au/pd/Young-Adul ... 085&sr=1-1)

So they started in audiobooks before terror and murder?

I really liked tge audiobooks of Jonathan a strange & Mr Norrell and Arthur & George.

Both have been recent TV dramas, but don't judge an audiobook by its to adaptation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isis

Around 8 miles away from where I'm sitting right now.

Abingdon?

Yip.

I didn't mean the audiobooks. I mean't the adapted for a radio play, full cast version:

http://www.lspace.org/fandom/events/rad ... uards.html

I also liked the Amazing Maurice radio play

http://www.lspace.org/fandom/events/rad ... dents.html

I used to live there. By the outboard motor shop on the river

You will be glad to know your missing the annual 'stop anyone moving around in town for two days' and if you live anywhere nearby have a truck parked right outside your front door with a generator running (*)


(*) otherwise known as the Michaelmas fair

:-)

(And hey the whole forum has been missing for hours this morning !)

Yup - apparently my server is popular enough to get DDoS'd. Yay, I guess.

You've finally made it.

Who did you piss off this time? Your impersonator? The Government? Dr Richard Gaywood? China? The Man?

Big Finish are doing some interesting Doctor Who stuff at the moment. John Hurt is reprising his role as the War Doctor for 12 stories, and Paul McGann is starring in The Time War, due out 2017.

I've just started listening to The Girl On The Train.

Not at all what I was expecting, bu very intriguing. Looking forward to the drive home.

Ok, I'm a bit new to this audiobook game.

I loved the Alan Partridge books because they're read by Alan.

I enjoyed the Vic Reeves autobiography because it's read by Vic.

I enjoyed the Narnia books because they're recordings of BBC radio play versions of the books, with a full cast and other trappings.

Now, what I'm having trouble with is fiction. Is it typical for the reader to "do" the voices for all the characters? Because I started listening to Shantaram the other day, and while I found the aussie guy doing an Indian accent a little off-putting, I found him putting on a sultry female voice for the protagonist's love-interest absolutely ludicrous, and I had to stop listening and delete it. No way am I listening to 48 hours of that nonsense.

Is that normal? Or is it more common for voices to be read flatly, in a he said, she said, kind of way?

Generally, the reader will 'do' the voices.

Oddly, The Girl On The Train has multiple narrators, which is rare.

Yeah, I can't get on with audiobooks like that. It's full audio plays or GTFO.

I think that's one of the reasons I like the Dresden Files audio books. James Marsters is an actor, not a narrator.

I can't tolerate the discworld audio books after the first two because of the awful voices, sadly

The worst one by far was the Dragonlance opener, Dragons of autumn Twilight. The guy reading that didn't even try. They would have got better reading from a voice synthesizer

Is The Wheel of Time worth getting on Audible. I've never read the books, so I was interested in spending my next credit on something epic.

Try one of the later ones

There are two types of Discworld audio , the abridged versions are all read by Tony Robinson (and are normally only about 2 hours or so)- the full unabridged early ones are read by either Nigel Planer , or Celia Imrie

At one point they changed and had them all read by Stephen Briggs (friend of Terry and the person who adapted a lot of the books for the stage) , he still 'does the voices' as such but they sound a lot better (to me at least) - from a quick search it looks like he took over around book 24 (The Fifth Elephant) so give one of the later ones a try.

There are some dramatizations but they do tend to be very abridged and you lose a lot from them (the radio 4 version of "The Amazing Maurice" is one of the better ones out there).

This

http://nerdist.com/tons-of-doctor-who-a ... to-stream/

Might also be of use to some of you - list (with links) to a lot of the Big Finish Doctor Who stories which you can stream free on Spotify

WoT starts great, but is ruined by Jordan's terrible prose and inability to advance a plot for most of the second half, then picks up hugely when Brendon Sanderson takes over. I don't know how much it being an audiobook would help with the interminable books 4-8 stretch, but it might be a big improvement.

An audiobook of a tedious book would probably just make it worse, if anything. It's not like you can really skim read.

Ones I've enjoyed lately have been:

Sapiens

and the follow-up

Homo Deus: A Bried History Of Tomorrow

American Gods, which is a fantastic version of Gaiman's preferred text and with a full cast.

Ready Player One, read just by Wil Wheaton but it just having a single narrator didn't bother me at all.

Currently just started listening to Neverwhere.

That American Gods audiobook sounds sexy.

I got Le Carre's Smiley series as radio plays recently, and it benefits so much from having a full cast. Smiley is played brilliantly too, a truly down-trodden, intelligent, world-wearied man. Highly recommended.

I can also recommend Louis Theroux revisiting his weird weekends. Fascinating stuff. But he does the voices. And when the voice is a pimp saying "And then I let that bitch slide up and down on my dick" (or something to that effect), it's teeth grindingly awful/brilliant.

Honestly, I don't know why his publisher didn't tell him to ditch the voices. But it's worth listening to.