Jenny Everywhere

Great Book, Great Reader!

Revisado: 10-05-22

Dr. Joe is a recent discovery, but not a singular one. I started with one of his books that unfortunately suffers from an unfortunate reader. When you turn science books into audio form, one crucial piece is that the reader has to understand the words and how to pronounce them. In this book, Jonathan Yen is downright awesome. This is a better audiobook due in part to his inclusion.

Get and listen to this book. It is both a scientific and auditory treat.

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A Great Book, held back by a mediocre reader.

Revisado: 09-27-22

I'm thoroughly enjoying the book. It's a wonderful collection of connections between seemingly unrelated things.

But I fear it has been harmed by the audiobook reader. He's probably a wonderful man, kind to children and loving to his wife. But the man keeps getting words wrong. An example of one such instance is calling substances, usually greasy or waxy, "em-you-lents". He means emollients, pronounced "em-ahl-ee-ents".

There's a lot of such mispronunciations. Some are less jarring, some more so. I'm finding them difficult to ignore, as they pop up suddenly. Like "pluh-SAH-bo" instead of "pluh-SEE-bo". They're not huge errors, but they're annoying, and they're straining my temptation to turn it off and choose another book to listen to.

Update: I set this book aside for a few days and tried it again. The content is wonderful. I love the questions, and the answers are not just accurate, but entertaining. Then the reader mangles another word, and my teeth clench.

Voice providers, please, Please, PLEASE check the pronunciation of words you're unfamiliar with. There are plenty of sources. Even videos or audio files that let you hear how it sounds. I implore you, please don't try to muscle through it, or sound it out. Check it and say it correctly. Every bad pronunciation makes it a little more likely that the listener is going to close the audio file and not try to listen to it again. This harms the reputation of the author, and they don't deserve that.

I've had audiobooks of some dear favorites (The Many-Colored Land, The Ladies of Mandrigyn, and others) utterly ruined because the reader doesn't know a word and won't check the pronunciation. Please don't guess. Look it up.

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I only had one issue with this version

Revisado: 08-13-22

Bronson Pinchot does Heinlein wonderfully. Even a row of asterisks doesn't challenge him, he reads them like any other sentence. He gets the emotion of this book precisely, all the way to the very last line.

What he CAN'T do, is perform a believable female voice! It nags at me, because of he could just train himself to speak in an even approximate female voice, it'd be light years beyond what he does now. All he seems to have is a whispery, simpering thing that doesn't sound at all like a woman. My best guess is that it probably sounds like a drag queen on a bad day.

But that is my ONLY issue, and it only cost him one star. The rest of the performance was masterful and grand. If you aren't as picky as I, you will very probably forgive him that single foible and give him that star back in profusion.

It's an excellent production. Buy it.

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A wonderfully entertaining story!

Revisado: 10-13-21

This is the second in the series, and a good continuance of the story. It's one of my "feel good" books, stories I turn to for comfort and escape. It's joined several of Glynn Stewart's books in that category.

I only have a couple of issues, and they're only technical issues with the performance. Alexander Trefethen's voice is AMAZING. It's warm, deep, butter-soft, and intoxicating. EXCEPT when he's trying to do an Irish accent. His Irish accent is atrocious! If he would take some time to learn a proper Irish accent, and maybe some Scots -- ok, all of the accents of Great Britain -- he'd be utterly magnificent. The swallowed vowels and resorting to an "uh" sound where he should be using an "ey" diphthong isn't terribly difficult with practice. If nothing else, listen to the Audible book of Charles Stross' "Anhillation Score", voiced by Elle Newlands, and try to learn from her delivery.

The only other issue I had with this book was a single word: Augment. Mr. Trefethen insists on adding a syllabile, making it "AUG-you-ment" instead of "AUG-ment". I wince every time I hear the extra syllable. It's maddening, and utterly correctable. The editors should have caught it and had Mr. Trefethen correct it. Heck, they should have caught the awful Irish accent, and had him correct THAT as well. This not a failing of Mr. Trefethen, it's a failing of the editorial staff that had the job of listening to it and making sure it was done WELL. They dropped the ball, and cost it a star for performance. Perhaps they will notice this review and revisit it, and have Trefethen make an updated version. (It does happen...Jim Butcher's book "Ghost Story" was redone with John Marsters, who should have done it initially but was unavailable at that time. They discovered that as well as the replacement reader had done, the fans were unhappy and required it to be redone when Marsters became available.)

Other than this, there's little I can find to complain about. Magic can answer many nitpicks in the story, so all that's left to question is performance. If the publisher has Mr. Trefethen redo it with the technical issues fixed, I will be more than happy to revisit it and correct my review.

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Great story, weak reader

Revisado: 05-25-21

The story is a wonderful epic, one of Lackey's best. That makes it doubly difficult to listen to the jarring, distracting mispronunciations from the reader.

Oh, he's CLOSE, but the more difficult words trip him up. He'll get the adjective "close", where the word used is the VERB, with a "z" sound to the "s", he mistakes a reference to a bow and arrow to a courtly bow, pronounced "bahw", instead of "bohw".

But the worst was his maddening mangling of Vanyel's last name. He typically says "ASS-krehv-on", instead of "ASH-keh-vron". Lackey is very predictable with name pronunciations. With her works, you truly do have to simply sound them out.

I know, it sounds petty. But I love visualizing the story as it's read, and mangling important words breaks the vision. It reduces enjoyment of the story.

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This was a better book than its predecessor. But..

Revisado: 09-18-19

...The author took the opportunity to make some truly petty Trump digs. They aren't unforgivable, but when I realized who "Dudley Remp" was supposed to symbolize, it soured my enjoyment for a while. This is very early in the book, and is pretty blatant, so it's not really a spoiler.

She did, however, make up for what looked like an erasure of the character "Tuck", who was not even obliquely referred to in the previous book. it looked like giving in to backlash. At least in this book Tuck was acknowledged, but not named, being explained as a deep Crown secret. That was fine. Again, it's very tangential, so not a spoiler.

A lot of the usual plot devices from the earlier books aren't used in this book, and that's refreshing. The earlier works are so steeped in sexuality, usually central to the plot, but this book thankfully breaks that formula. It's welcome to see a character grow and succeed without the proof being a relationship. it didn't detract from the story one bit, and imho made it a much better story. Less formulaic, more considered.

The annoying metaphorical comparisons with Trump didn't ruin the book for me because the rest of the book was genuinely excellent.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Great story, mediocre reader.

Revisado: 09-21-18

I love the stories of Larry Niven. Beowulf Schaeffer is a serious personage, stepfather of Louis Wu, and much of Ringworld's plot is predicated of these stories.

But this reader has come close to ruining my appreciation for them. His sense of timing is odd, his delivery iambic when it isn't wooden. Worst, he clearly doesn't understand the concept of "operative words".

Operative words are the ones in a phrase upon which the interpretation intended by the author rely. When you say them, you emphasize the words that make them say what the story needs them to say -- you can change the meaning by emphasizing different words. This reader, when he emphasizes operative words, emphasizes the wrong ones for the appropriate meaning.

Take two particular words: dueling stunners, as in "the modified weapons were Jinxian dueling stunners". The proper emphasis is DUELING stunners. Stunners used to duel. This reader kept saying "dueling STUNNERS". It seems trivial , except that the meaning has changed into stunners THAT DUEL. That's not what Niven intended. PEOPLE use the stunners TO DUEL.

His emphasis sounds like "dueling BANJOS", banjos engaged in a duel. In "Deliverance", the a banjo duels a guitar in a song called Dueling Banjos. Reversing the emphasis would change them into banjos you use to fight, like El Kabong whacking you with a guitar.

Once is annoying. Twice is frustrating. Dozens of times makes you want to stop listening.

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A tad formulaic, but still excellent

Revisado: 06-09-18

All of Glynn Stewart's works follow a basic formula, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This isn't a story that requires deep thought our analysis -- it's a mystical romp through one of Stewart's well-crafted worlds. The story is intricate but not complicated, a standard progression of pawn to the furthest rank, at quick time it is elevated to great power and authority. But the character earns it's enlargement.

This story fulfills this pattern well, and entertains as it happens. The characters are likeable and well formed. The villains are vicious and venal and crafted to their roles. It isn't Dune, but heck, it'd be boring of every story was.

A good read. You won't regret picking it up.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas

Good, but reader should have looked stuff up.

Revisado: 01-28-17

My biggest problem with this reading was that the reader should have looked up how to pronounce "Poictesme". It's not "poyk-TEZ-mee", it's "pwah-TEM". It's a portmanteau of two French city names. The rest of the reading was okay, but every time I heard that mangled planet name, it jarred.

This is not an unreasonable expectation, for a reader to check the pronunciation for unusual words.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Good reading, minor error grates

Revisado: 12-14-16

Good, but the reader repeatedly says "merc" as "mere". It's the abbreviation of "mercenary", not "merely" anything. Clearly, it's a usage the reader wasn't familiar with, so she replaced the "c" with an "e" to make the word familiar.

Other than that, a couple of names came out differently than were pronounced in older works. The Queen's Own is "Talia", whom this reader pronounces "tah-LEE-uh" instead of the usual "TAH-lee-uh". Fans of this author get very picky about things like that.

All that aside, it was a wonderful reading.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas