Wish I Had Read It in Print

[Sandi]

What books do you think you might have liked better in print?

I'm about 4 hours into Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay and I'm thinking that I might really like this better in print. It's really slow and detailed and I keep losing track of the narrative.

I read Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy in print and really liked it. I got Best Served Cold in audio and couldn't make it through the first 1/4 of the book. I might have liked it in print.

What about you?

[Shelly]

Anything by Agatha Christie I can't do the audio version of. She has so many characters that it's difficult to keep track of them. I need the ability to flip back a few pages and go "Oh, right, you're the nephew."

[Heidi]

Hunger Games is much better in print IMO.

[Sandi]

Heidi I wrote: "Hunger Games is much better in print IMO."

I believe that. The narrator of the audio book sounds like a 60 year old reading to a group of 6th graders, not a 16 year old girl fighting for her life.

[Dero]

The things I like better on print are mysteries and crime stories.

[John, Moderator]

The only book I can think of for this thread was one about which I was left conflicted: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. The narrator, William Dufris, was terrific, but the words fly by so very fast that one really needs the print edition to follow the entries.

[Stef]

I prefer most non-fiction in print. I remember especially feeling that way about Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers because the narrator used a sort of coy "tee-hee, we're talking about corpses" voice. But sometimes I prefer non-fiction in print because the author goes off on tangents where they don't know what they're talking about, and if I'm reading it, I can skip the nonsense. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World had that problem toward the end.

Then there are books where the narrator just doesn't work for me. Cassandra Morris in The Elegance of the Hedgehog really overdoes her character. OK she's supposed to be 12 but she doesn't have to sound that much like it.

[Taliah]

Heidi I wrote: "Hunger Games is much better in print IMO."

Agree. I started Catching Fire on audio and had to switch to print.

[Taliah]

The Thirteenth Tale was much easier to follow and more enjoyable in print.

[Kay]

Anything with a lot of maps or photos is problematic. I had some trouble following Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August despite an excellent narration by Nadia May, one of my favorite readers. It was hard to follow the various battles and conflicts, so I finally ended up buying a used edition of the book just to have recourse to the maps.

I'm having a similar problem with the book I'm listening to now, The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr, which is about Caravaggio. Here the problem is twofold -- it would help to be able to see some of the paintings being described. Also, I'm finding the narrator, Campbell Scott, incredibly boring. He speaks in sort of a hushed monotone. The best that can be said for him is that his voice isn't distracting. Much of the book describes endless details of two researchers working in a dusty archive. Yawn.

[Sara ♥]

I listened to Island of the Blue Dolphins a little while back...... And WOW, I remember liking this book a LOT more when I was younger. The narrator was unbelievably monotone.... and she read SO SLOWLY—I thought it would never ever end. But then, maybe the book is just boring...?

Ugh... And don't get me started on 2001: A Space Odyssey! Of course, I don't think I would have liked it in print any more—except I wouldn't haven't wasted as many hours of my life on it....