Audio Books

Currently listening to John Guy’s biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. The reader is a woman with an ‘RP’ accent and I am giggling at the way she butchers Scots place names. She has a pleasant voice otherwise.

Hello Blossoming ?
Yes, it’s surprising how much excellent free stuff there is on there

Another Audible fan here. Audible has a lot of ‘included with membership’ stuff too now, which has allowed me to listen to authors I haven’t heard before. You don’t have to download them to your library. I have 248 books in there.

Just checked - 294 titles.
And that doesn’t include the ones that I have returned

I’m probably one of Audible’s best customers.
I think that I have well over 250 books.

I've become an avid BorrowBox user, partly because I can't focus my eyes on a book by evening, and partly because it helps me get to sleep.

I know a narrator is good when I suddenly realize, part way through a book, that I haven't actually given the narration a thought!
(It's unfortunate that I (we?) notice what's not good so much more quickly than what is good.)

The very last book I listened to included several working-class characters from Sheffield.
Unfortunately, the narrator had no idea how to pronounce the glottal 't' that was ever-present in the dialogue.
Each time it was needed, she was adding what sounded like a whole extra word: to. This resulted in sentences such as, "She'll start work in to factory^ ", and "He's gone down to to pub to talk to to landlord".

As a native northerner, I found this very distracting, as I reflected each time on what she should have said.

The book I'm listening to at the moment has a narrator whose French characters mispronounce common French words such as Monsieur. OK, I only notice those because I can speak the language, so I'm probably being a bit unreasonable, and she is otherwise a decent narrator.

There are some great narrators out there though - I just wish that the technology was there to enable us to select whichever one we wanted for every book that we download.

My late husband was disabled and struggled to hold a book he used to use www.listening-books.org.uk/ sorry if not allowed to put a link but it is a charity he used to pay a very reasonable yearly subscription.

I get Alexa to read my kindle books at night. I ask her to switch off after 30 minutes which just times it nicely to fall asleep. Books cost me 99p each so an inexpensive way to hear audio books. I have joined Audible a couple of times but I seldom find anything I want . One exception was Miriam Margolis who reads her own book and it is great as she is so good at accents.

Yes I use BorrowBox from the library and always use preview to see if I like the narrators voice. I have an immediate yes or no response.