Favorite Narrators -- and Least Favorite

 

YOU can read me the phone book

First and foremost, the GiGis  -- the two most prolific of audiobook readers. There is a reason they get all those gigs.

• George Guidall
• Grover Gardner

And then the rest of the best, they bring the stories to life without taking them over

• Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (reads Rivers of London series)
  
  
  
• Lisette Lecat 
• The late great Edward Hermann
• Tony Britton
• Davina Porter
• Simon Prebble
• Scott Brick
• Barbara Rosenblat
• Wil Wheaton (yes, of Star Trek fame)

 

The ones I avoid

• Ulli Birve (terrible pacing; reads Heyer mysteries)
• Elizabeth Klett (American with limited arsenal of British accents)
• William Dufris -- whiny females
• John Wells -- terrible at voices; not bad at straight reading
• Lorna Raver -- makes a 40 year old woman sound like a doddering old woman
• Authors, other than actors, reading their own books, even if they are professional public speakers
  

What makes a good narrator

I have been listen to books almost exclusively for the past 15 years and in that period of time I have read/listened to close to a thousand different productions. I now have a fairly idea of what I think makes a good narrator -- or at least what I hope for when I listen.

A good narrator does not click, clack, snort, swallow, sniff, smack or hiss.

A good narrator knows how to properly phrase a sentence, knows where to pause and where to breath. Pacing is important. When it is a great narrator, it is so natural that you don't even know it is happening.

A good narrator makes age appropriate choices for voice characterizations. A 40 years old woman should not sound as if she is on her death bed.

A good narrator must know how to pronounce "dour" -- and it does not rhyme with "sour." Pronunciation is important and I am not just taking about the words that we learned to read before we ever heard them used in a sentence -- like respite, antipodes, debacle. Narrators need to do their homework. They need to know how to properly pronounce every single proper noun in the book they are reading and if they don't know, they need to look it up. A constant barrage of mispronounced words detracts from the reading experience.

But, it is not enough to get the technical stuff right --and that is what separates a good narrator from a great narrator --

A good narrator does not intrude into the narrative but carries it along as if he or she isn't even there. A good narrator may be an actor but there is a big difference between sitting behind a mic and being on stage in front of audience. George Guidall pointed out in a 2017 NYT interview that you have to have "an emotional underpinning." and that "there’s a rhythm to speech in terms of what’s implied. If it’s raining in the book, there’s got to be something about the voice that evokes the rain.”