Audiobook fails
May. 26th, 2023 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearTwo more DNFs for the first half of the year - I don't have a particularly good track record so far for 2023!
These were both audiobooks, abandoned for opposite reasons.
A Thousand Li: The First Step by Tao Wong:
I recently discovered that Travis Baldree is an excellent audiobook narrator, so I checked out his back catalogue and discovered that he reads mostly fantasy subgenres - litRPG, progression and cultivation fantasy, to be exact, none of which I'd come across before. The cultivation stuff sounded interesting so I picked this one to try - and it's not. I liked the characters and the basic storyline of them trying to follow a path to mastery of different skills, in order to aid the war effort. But the technicalities of 'cultivation' (meditation and martial training, with weird wibbly qi-related shenanigans) just wore me down after a while, and I gave up.
Limits of Power by Elizabeth Moon:
This is the fourth in the Paladin's Legacy series, which I've recently been devouring in audiobook form. But the narrator of this one just grated really badly for me. All the pronunciations are different to those of the first three books and something about her intonation (and range of character voices) set my teeth on edge. I tried to stick it out, because I'm keen to find out what happens and be able to progress to the next book, but I decided I couldn't last 20 hours with her voice in my ears, so I gave up and found whatever information I could online to fill in the gaps before moving on.
These were both audiobooks, abandoned for opposite reasons.
A Thousand Li: The First Step by Tao Wong:
I recently discovered that Travis Baldree is an excellent audiobook narrator, so I checked out his back catalogue and discovered that he reads mostly fantasy subgenres - litRPG, progression and cultivation fantasy, to be exact, none of which I'd come across before. The cultivation stuff sounded interesting so I picked this one to try - and it's not. I liked the characters and the basic storyline of them trying to follow a path to mastery of different skills, in order to aid the war effort. But the technicalities of 'cultivation' (meditation and martial training, with weird wibbly qi-related shenanigans) just wore me down after a while, and I gave up.
Limits of Power by Elizabeth Moon:
This is the fourth in the Paladin's Legacy series, which I've recently been devouring in audiobook form. But the narrator of this one just grated really badly for me. All the pronunciations are different to those of the first three books and something about her intonation (and range of character voices) set my teeth on edge. I tried to stick it out, because I'm keen to find out what happens and be able to progress to the next book, but I decided I couldn't last 20 hours with her voice in my ears, so I gave up and found whatever information I could online to fill in the gaps before moving on.
