Tina Fey's Bossypants benefited enormously from the sound of her voice, for instance, and Amy Poehler voiced Yes Please earlier this year with the help of a cast that included Seth Meyers, Carol Burnett, Patrick Stewart, Kathleen Turner, and Amy Poehler's parents. Some, though, is formally provocative: John Scalzi's Lock In comes in two versions – one voiced by Wil Wheaton and one by Amber Benson – because the gender of its narrator isn't specified.īooks by performers, though, have maybe been making the biggest strides toward an independent argument for audiobooks. Some of it is a logical extension of a project's structure: the audiobook of the Paula Hawkins novel The Girl On The Train, which is a story told by three different narrators, uses three different women to voice those narrators, section by section. That's changing, though experimentation is ongoing. But for much of the history of audiobooks in the post-MP3-player and post-smartphone era, it's still been mostly just somebody reading a book out loud to you.

In nonfiction, you usually get a straightforward read-through of the text for hours and hours, which can be satisfying or very taxing, depending on whether the voice pleases your particular ear. (How tricky it is to find readers for romance novels, who are usually women, who can credibly and comfortably voice female romance protagonists and male romantic heroes as both are usually written is a fascinating side road I won't wander down today.)

Others modulate their tones just a little, just enough to distinguish the dialogue. Some, like Bobby Cannavale in his fantastic read of Richard Price's New York crime novel Lush Life and Michael Beck with several different John Grisham novels, bend and twist their voices to give life to a broad range of people of different genders and races and backgrounds.

In fiction, you get readers who are asked to provide voices for however many characters the author invented. Very often, they're literally just books read aloud, to the best of the ability of a single, usually highly skilled reader. Flo Rida? Aziz Ansari Surveys 'Modern Romance'Īudiobooks have traditionally been tricky to get right and even harder to make special. Author Interviews From Dating Exhaustion To.

Modern romance by aziz ansari