[51/365] Narrators

[cosmolinguist]

I get an Audible book credit every month. Last month I got a book called Starlight Detectives, which is about nineteenth and early twentieth century development of photography and better telescopes and other technology. It hugely increased astronomical knowledge, like figuring out what stars are made of and that galaxies are moving away from each other. Because professional astronomers weren't interested in more than naked-eye stuff for a long time (like their job was just to catalog stars so they could be used for maritime navigation), it was left to amateurs to develop and work on this stuff. So you hear about a lot of "inventors and eccentrics," as the subtitle puts it, or white men as I think of them. Mostly they kinda blurred together for me, but it was still an interesting book.

With one flaw: I am very picky about audiobook narrators, and this one seemed okay in the sample you can get before you buy it, but that hid his habit of putting on terrible accents when reading quotes. This is a non-fiction book; it's not like voices had to be distinguished from each other! And since the narrator was American (he was very good at Boston accents!) and a lot of the people were British, they came out sounding vaguely Australian. It was not good.

And this month I picked a book about NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto (and beyond!). I am hoping for less white men in a modern astronomical story.

I'm not too far into this one yet, but I have detected a flaw with this narrator as well! He's one of the writers, he's definitely American, but he's trying hard not to say "Pluto" like an American. He is saying "plu-toe," really hitting that t because I think he doesn't want to say it the normal American way with that alveolar tap I love so much. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind how anybody says "Pluto," I just don't like the emphasis he seems to be putting on it in order to say it a way that seems unnatural to him. I think it's unnatural because not only does it sound weird but he doesn't always do it. Whenever he says /ˈpluːroʊ/ I want to applaud and cheer a little to encourage him to do it more.

But since it's a book about Pluto I expect to hear /pluːˈtoʊ/ about fifteen million more times.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Like seriously. /pluːˈtʰoʊ/ even. Nnnrgh, I hate it.

[raino]

oooh that book sounds so fascinating! I've been thinking it must have been mind-bogglingly amazing to discover for the first time that some of the smudges in nighttime sky are, in fact, other _galaxies_. As big or bigger as our own! Woops, the Universe just suddenly expanded a million times.

[cosmolinguist]

Yep, that's exactly the kind of thing it's about. And being able to know what stars are made of! Which was thought impossible since we could never go there. It does sound like a very exciting time.

[jesse_the_k]

A lousy narrator can make an audiobook painful to read. Can you speak to percentage of annoying ticks in commercial vs “adaptive” audio narrations?

It’s one reason I love my current ebook app for iOS, KyBook Reader 3. It happily displays ePub, mobis, and PDFs in fonts I can actually see! Plays audiobooks as well, but, alas, does not offer narrator overrides just yet.

[cosmolinguist]

The commercial audiobooks have totally applied me for listening to my screenreader (and not least because I'm less interested in phonology I'll be tested on than astronomy/history that's just pleasant!).