Tens of thousands of audio recordings. I spent a couple of days going through 1500 of them posted on Internet Archive in the last 18 months, picked out 40, and didn't finish one of them. It was "painful to the ear".
Isn't that a sad commentary on reading?
Lots of people love to read.
Hardly any of the ones volunteering for Librivox are any good at reading out loud.
The biggest problem is people who can't pronounce words. Some of the readers with American accents can't pronounce English words. I'm not talking about using a BBC accent. I'm talking about saying common words wrong in an American accent. Aside from that, there are people who make the mistake of pretending to speak in a BBC accent when they haven't studied it. An actor in an interview warned against doing that in an audition. Nobody should do it in an audiobook either.
Then there are the readers who mangle common phrases, putting stress on the wrong words, as if they never heard those phrases spoken out loud let alone used them in their own conversation. I'm not talking about the strained syntax of Victorian melodramatic works or the unfamiliar phrasing of Regency novels. I'm talking about plain straightforward writing that loses meaning because it doesn't sound like somebody talking, it sounds like somebody being careful to say every word. Even mispronounced or mis-stressed.
Or readers recording the words, not telling a story. I've heard two different readers who sounded like machines; they should have saved their voice. Another reader sounded like he was going through a vocabulary list in the back of a students' version of a German work.
There are people who insist on reading material with French or German phrases or something other language, who don't bother to find out how to say them properly. If you haven't studied French, you are going to screw up the liaison every time, so don't record it
Some try to produce drama to their own taste, and the result is ummmm what is the word I want? Well, the best example is the woman reading Camilla who gave Mr Dubster a southern accent. Anachronistic much? She did the same thing to a character in another English novel. These people might think they are bringing out new features in the material; all they are is a pain to listen to.
This includes the people who race through the text as if they have a bet on. Are you reading this, Christine? Christine has a habit of swallowing the ends of words so you aren't sure if it was a past or present participle, besides the word going by so fast you hardly even hear it.
At this point all I have to do is listen to the Librivox opening statement to know which type of reader I have. OK, the intro doesn't allow any dramatization. But you can tell if people read in a monotone or are simply reproducing the words vocally instead of trying to communicate with the listener.
It's also true that lots of books are not meant to be read aloud. The ones with lots of exposition and description, for example. There's a reason that people who teach writing tell you to use action verbs. Or the ones that repeat a phrase, like the book that tells you fifty times in two pages what a dead loss the protagonist is. You know, Victorian material. Both are boring. It doesn't matter if it is your favorite book, if the first page or page and a half are like this, don't inflict it on listeners.
There are a very few professional dramatizations on Librivox. I don't expect people who have had no training in acting to come up to that level. I just want them to sound as if they understand what they're reading, but they don't. I wish they had been able to get a stranger to listen to their recording before they sent it in. They probably wouldn't send it if they got an honest review first. Sure, there wouldn't be as many recordings on Librivox as there are. But what there was wouldn't be "absolutely frightening", as Henry Higgins would say.
I'm only talking about prose. When the prose is that bad, listening to people's attempts at reading poetry is not a punishment I'm willing to put myself through.
I'm just saying....
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