Audiobook Discussions: Pet Peeves

I have been doing a lot of audiobook listening lately and I attended a recent blogger webinar about audiobook reviewing which got me thinking more and more about audiobooks.  So I wanted to know more of what you think about them!  From there, Audiobook Discussions has been born!

This time I want to know what your listening pet peeves are!

I have a couple.  Most annoying in terms of listening is a monotone voice.  If it is non-fiction it will put me right to sleep because listening to facts and figures can be dry by itself, but you add a monotone voice too it and… zzzzzzzz!  With fiction, while you don’t have to necessarily do voices, it is more interesting if characters can be distinguished from one another or the pace and timbre of the voice changes with exciting parts or danger/suspense etc. 

Outside the aspect of the actual production, on element that really drives me crazy is when a series of books have different narrators.  It’s fine if maybe the point-of-view character changes, but if it is all from the same POV, I would like to continue with the same narrator.  I know sometimes this cannot happen for logistical reasons, but it really throws me off, especially when I really liked the performance of the narrator. 

And the final one that I will mention here is mispronunciations.  I understand that sometimes it is a regional thing, but I cannot tell you how much it grated at me to hear a local town pronounced SO wrong in a production I listened to recently that it just kept popping back up into my head even though the name only came up twice.  It was certainly a small thing, but it stuck with me to the end.

So what are your pet peeves when listening to books?

 

You can check out the other posts in this series:

• How You Listen
• Why You Listen
• What You Listen To
• The Audible App
• The Audie Awards
• What Makes a Good Production
• Favorite Narrators
• Book Extras

 

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