The Turn of the Screw - SPOILER-FREE

[Renata]

This begins a group discussion of our Classics book selection, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, nominated by Lea.
Here you can comment, without spoilers, on any aspects of the book, either before, during, or after reading it.

[Zeljka]

Hm, I brought it home from library... The reviews are divided so I am still deciding whether to read it or skip it... We'll see.. today I'm thinking how life is to short to commit myself to reading books I have no interest, but tomorrow will maybe be the day when I think that it is a great day to read something I wouldn't normally read:-)

[Lea]

The audio is five hours for me, so I'm hoping that is a good format. If it isn't, I will pick up the paperback. It's 121 pages.

[aPriL does feral sometimes]

I liked it, but it wasn’t what I expected, having seen the movie first.

[Banshee]

I would recommend the audiobook. The book seems to be known for a certain grammatical quirk which is maybe part of the experience, but from what I've seen that experience is negative for a lot of people. I saw fragments of an ebook and I personally found it challenging, and not in a good way. So I'm glad I ended up listening to the audio instead.

[Kim]

I actually listened to some of the audio a few years ago but could not focus on it. I said that I would try to read it someday to see if that made a difference and I think it does for me. His writing seems to have lots of hitches if that makes sense - doesn’t flow nicely but still the imagery is created.

[Panda]

The audiobook narrated by Vanessa Benjamin was nominated for an Audie Award, although it didn't win.

I found Vanessa to have a beautiful voice with an incredible narration on the descriptive parts. I did not care for some of her choice in voices for some of the characters, however, and thought at least one was questionable. It's not a bad audiobook if the voices aren't annoying to you personally, if they are then it's really going to be an issue.

There are at least two dozen English narrator choices for this book. The version I read was published in 2008. Audible has the one narrated by Emma Thompson as part of it's plus catalog, that I have in my library that was published in 2016 I had forgotten about that I much prefer.

[Kamila]

I was surprised when I started reading it because I haven’t realised that the Netflix series The Hunting of the Bly Manor was based on this book! I usually try reading classics without reading the reviews or anything like that because it’s so easy to end up reading spoilers.

Anyway, I got my ebook from the Gutenberg Project. It was a good read but I did prefer the series.