SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Jane in a BOTM thread brought up a great point that there seems to be a certain separate component of reading that comes from how we come to experience the author's words--the difference between print and audio, and native language and translation, for example.

How do you process these differences? What are your expectations? How do you compensate if you think that the format is impacting your viewpoint?

I am accustomed to tuning out sound in order to read in physical print or e-books. Although I do listen to podcasts, I find that I have a limited attention span in that format. I don't like having to go back and re-listen. So I avoid audio books. I read only physical print or e-books.

As for language, I can theoretically read in five languages, but in practice I only have enough vocabulary to comprehend most of what I read in three of them--English, Hebrew and French. My vocabulary in German and Russian is very limited. So for those languages, or any others in which I have no background at all, I must read translations. I do believe that I am missing flavor and nuance that existed in the original language when I do that, but I don't know how to compensate for that loss.

translation is something that can be bad or can be good. I loved the French translation of The Name of the Wind as it retains the poeticness (don't know the correct word for this) of the original and the flow is very good

I am exclusively an eye reader. I personally prefer my imagination to provide voices, tone, etc. I think audiobooks are kind of like television to me, in that my imagination takes a backseat to what is put before my senses, whether it's by hearing or seeing. And I'm a bit strange in that I don't watch television. Does this make sense? So my perspective would be different as an eye reader than someone hearing the audio. And that could easily go either way!

I only listen to audio books in the car and they can't be too enthralling or I get distracted from my driving. I liked Paul Theroux's and Bill Bryson's travel books, books by people doing long journeys (especially hiking/biking ones) and stuff like Lord of the Rings.

and I can only do these books in English

Apologies for one of my ridiculously long posts when everybody else has been able to express themselves so much more concisely. :)

I’ve had a lot of trouble with audiobooks in the past, although I’ve always liked the idea of them. I love the idea of being more productive during times when my hands and eyes are busy but my brain is free. My main frustration has always been with the feeling that I don’t get as much out of audiobooks as I do out of print books, because I retain and absorb print information better than verbal information. In addition, with print books it's easier to find and re-read information if needed. I read primarily e-books, and I often take advantage of the search function. Other complaints I've had with audiobooks are that my attention wanders and it’s harder to pick up what I missed, plus I’m also annoyed by various audio narrator quirks, and I just have a limited tolerance for noise, especially a lot of non-stop talking.

However, early this year I managed to drastically improve and increased my audio listening by looking at audiobooks as “series sampling” opportunities. I listen to the first books in various series I’m interested in, then decide whether I like them enough to pursue them in print someday. This has greatly reduced my frustration with feeling like I don’t absorb the details as well. If I like it enough, my intent is to someday re-read the first book in print, at which time I’ll get the chance to “properly” appreciate the book, and then continue on with the sequels in print. So I feel like, if I miss out on anything during the audio experience, I’ll get another chance. And if I didn’t like it enough to pursue it in print, then does it really matter if I didn’t catch all the details? With more practice, I’m also getting better at pushing through audiobooks with narrators I don’t care for, and I think my audio listening skills have improved in general.

The tricky part is separating my opinions about the narrator’s performance from my opinions about the text itself to make an accurate determination about whether I’d enjoy it in print or not. I *think* I’m doing ok with that, but a narrator definitely plays a big role in one’s enjoyment of an audiobook. It can be especially troublesome if a narrator voices a character in a way that conflicts with how I would have read them in print. For example, sometimes a narrator will make a character sound constantly irritable or petulant when I don’t think the text supports that and I’m sure I would have read them more pleasantly in my own head. I often find myself imagining how I would have interpreted the text in my head differently if I had been reading it. Sometimes it’s sort of like I’m seeing the words in my head as the narrator reads them, and then re-reading them to myself with my own spin.

Translations I think are more difficult. With an audiobook, the narrator is still reading the exact words from the book, and I can mentally reinterpret those words. With a translation, I only have the translator’s words. I try to keep in mind that I’m not getting the full original experience with a translation, but I can’t know for sure if I would have liked the original version better or worse.

A perception I’ve seen a lot, although not usually in this group, is that audiobooks are cheating, or the easy way out, or something along those lines. I think audiobooks are hard! For me, print is the easy way. Audiobooks demand greater and more constant attention, and a better memory since it’s not easy to refer back to things. Keeping track of a lot of character names is especially challenging for me in an audiobook. A well-performed audiobook does reduce some of the need for the listener to use their imagination, at least in terms of character tones and personalities. On the other hand, a poorly-performed audiobook requires one to have an even stronger imagination that can shout over the narrator’s poor performance to still appreciate a good story.

One other thing I wanted to comment on is that people process information in different ways. Sometimes in other conversations I’ve seen the perception that a person who listened to an audiobook naturally got less out of the book than somebody else who read it in print. I don’t believe this is always true, and it’s surely not as simple as that. I’ve known a lot of people at work who will understand what I say better if I speak it to them than if I write it to them, even if I’m giving them extensive instructions. And even though I consider myself a worse listener than I am a reader, I still find I understand and retain verbal information better than most of my peers at work. People do have different levels of comprehension abilities, regardless of format, and a person’s interest level and motivation and any existing familiarity with a topic will also have a very large impact on their comprehension. I've read books in print that I've retained and understood worse than my typical experience with audiobooks just because I was so uninterested in the content.

To fully answer Allison's questions in the OP, I'll have to go into some personal history. I'll put it as a spoiler so those who aren't interested can easily pass it by.

(view spoiler)[When I was about fifteen years old, something broke in my brain. I don't know what it was, or how it happened. I forgot how to read. I could, and can still read on some level, obviously, but it hasn't functioned "well" for some 40 years now. I can't easily focus on longer texts for more than a few moments at a time, and often have to reread pages or paragraphs two or three times to absorb their meaning rather than only subvocalizing a sequence of sounds.

I consider it a disability, although no one else that I know or have heard of has this issue. I've never given up reading, but it's tempting at times... especially during times of stress when my concentration ability is even more effed up than usual, or when I've read several indifferent books in a row.

Getting political-ish for a moment, it infuriates me when people say that listening to an audiobook "isn't really reading." Why the hell not? Are we missing out on some crucial element of reading by not paging past the indicia, or there not being "pages" at all? (hide spoiler)]

Audiobooks are a blessing for me, and I'm glad I've discovered them. I have fewer "processing issues" than I do with text, although some of the same things do crop up in both formats, including a complete inability to do either at a rate of speed much faster than ordinary speech.

How do you process these differences?

In audio, I can, depending on the book and the narrator, simply shut off the part of my brain that continuously and self-consciously processes the words that are entering my head. In the best case, the words seemingly go straight from my ears into my brain. A narrator with a good storyteller's cadence is really helpful for that. Newscaster-like narrations are much less appealing, though they do work similarly, given time.

What are your expectations?

(This in re translation)

I've read and watched a bunch of anime and manga, and am sorry to say that the default expectation for those media in particular is fairly low. I gets annoying when I can't get the sense of what's going on because the translator either translated panel to panel or sentence to sentence (depending on the medium) without putting any thought into how it flows on a larger scale, or they lost their intuition of how English is supposed to look and feel.

How do you compensate if you think that the format is impacting your viewpoint?

I'll switch, if the other format is easily available or cheap, and I'm enjoying it enough to justify the extra effort and/or expense. Certain audiobook narrations are hard for me to take: yelling is right out (most of the time), snarky/bratty narrators are a no, as or lisps or lilts, or narrations that are flat and undifferentiated in tone. If the sample has any of these qualities, I will pass the book by in audio, and pick it up in "black and white."

As for translation, I'm monolingual, so I'm stuck with whatever is available. :)

I'm not sure if YouKneeK or I won the "novella-length post" contest! ;)

Haha Beth, your post wins for awesomeness! You posted a lot of great thoughts, and I especially liked that you’re coming from the perspective of finding audiobooks easier to process than text.

Beth, the "audiobooks aren't reading" thing also really annoys me! I remember a time when I thought audiobooks were just for people who couldn't eye-read for whatever reason, and it's almost funny how much of a full turn I've made since then :)

Also, I've never heard of that! I'm trying to imagine what it feels like, and I'm kind of settling on just it being really hard to concentrate? Like reading with lots of distractions?

I think that's a fairly close (and much shorter) way of describing it, yes, Anna. Sometimes I can get through a whole page "normally" but for the vast majority of the time my brain is constantly running interference in one way or another, between me and what I'm reading.

YouKneeK wrote: "I often find myself imagining how I would have interpreted the text in my head differently if I had been reading it. Sometimes it’s sort of like I’m seeing the words in my head as the narrator reads them, and then re-reading them to myself with my own spin."

This most often happens to me when it comes to characters. Sometimes it's the narrator putting a spin on the character that doesn't fit with my conception of them, or when they're voicing a character across genders in a way that feels like they're taking shortcuts or playing to stereotypes. I can understand the idea of audiobooks as performance, for that reason, but I don't think I've ever let that performance overwrite my own interpretations of the characters. What I do is likely close to the other way around, similar to what YKK describes.

(That kind of sounds like what I imagine ADHD brains are like. Except not just while reading, of course. I'll stop interrogating you about it now!)

I'm way too tired right now, but as I'm listening to something that reminded me of this, I'll quickly blurt this out. I think that not only does the narrator and their style/character voices/accents/etc. change how I feel about the book, but it also matters which particular book happens to be the first one by that narrator I listen to. If the narrator/book pairing is good and I feel like the audiobook brought something new to the story, I'm more likely to seek out more books narrated by that person. And even if the other pairings don't work out as well, I'm still more likely to put up with any little quirks, and they don't take away from my enjoyment of the book or my ability to concentrate on it. And the same is true in reverse, there are books I absolutely will not listen to because of the narrator.

But also, I've listened to books I couldn't take seriously, because I was used to the narrator reading a different style/genre of book, and it kept messing with my head. It's like seeing an actor from a long running series in a new role, it's like the character you know is acting, and it's very confusing! This can make a serious book ridiculous, or otherwise change how I interpret what's going on.

So yes, audiobooks do change how I interpret books, but usually it's for the better! I should learn to stop listening when the narrator is not working for me, instead of pushing through and ending up disliking the book.

Anyone wanting to discuss specific book/narrators: Best and Worst Audiobooks and Narrators

I think it's quite reasonable to say that listening to audiobooks isn't reading. The definition of reading is gleaning information from written words. The problem is when people say that listening is somehow inferior to reading, or that "it doesn't count". I think it's fine to use reading as a catch-all term for experiencing a book, and it's a bit ridiculous when people split hairs over this, but the technical definition is where it comes from.

I don't personally listen to audiobooks, but I'm interested the point people brought up about translations. Why would the audio version be any different from the text version, relative to originally-English works? In both cases the words are translated, and you're essentially reading a joint work made by two authors.

When I started seriously reading sci-fi & fantasy, it was in Dutch translations borrowed from the library. I started with Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. The first part had been translated, the subsequent parts were not yet, and I think they never were. And that sucks... ;-)

Some translations are of so good quality they put the translator's name on the book cover, which is a very rare honour. Most others will have their cringey moments. Clunky made-up neologisms to translate words Dutch has no direct translation for, fantasy terminology which is translated throughout but left in the English original for a chapter or two, names that were replaced with more Dutch-sounding names for the first half of a series and then suddenly kept as in the original for the second half, etc.

If you can ignore such mishaps, translations into Dutch are generally quite good. But still, at some point I decided I'd avoid paying money for translations. I'll either borrow or read the original.

Translations from English into Vietnamese, now that's something I've learned to avoid like the plague. ;-)

Beth wrote: "To fully answer Allison's questions in the OP, I'll have to go into some personal history. I'll put it as a spoiler so those who aren't interested can easily pass it by.

When I was about fifteen y..."

Thank you for sharing, I think it is so important to highlight how we all read differently. A couple of years ago I got sick and diagnosed with a vestibular disorder. Prior to this I read equally by audio and eye but after it I am dizzy all the time and my eyes jump between lines making me think they are all the same line, if that makes sense. So now I mainly do audiobooks. I still eye ball read but it takes so much concentration and many times a book mark to keep myself on the same line. If it weren't for audiobooks, I would read much less and be so bored while doing house chores or cooking 😂

I also feel like audiobooks are a blessing and feel no less connected to a book because I listened rather then eyed it. Actually, my partner who has no disablity also perfers audio v written, and is able to concentrate better that way. On the other hand, my father is unable to concentrate on audiobooks and can only eye read.

Ann, I agree audiobooks usually change it for the better for me and if I really disliked the narrationrI may try to eye read it. One of this month's books, I hated the narration but had to keep on with the book, but in the end even thought I hated, I mean HATED the narrator's performance, I still was able to love the book. And had to suffer through a second performance for the second book, because that is all that was available to me. But there have definitely been times where I am liking the book more because of the narration than I believe I would if I had eye read it, but then again that is an assumption I am making and it might not be true.

Ryan wrote: "I think it's quite reasonable to say that listening to audiobooks isn't reading. The definition of reading is gleaning information from written words. The problem is when people say that listening ..."

Perhaps, but definitions change over time as technologies and attitudes change, and being over-prescriptive when talking about dictionary definitions can be counterproductive to real dicussion.

To me, language is about communication. When semantics/defintional challenges to someone's communication occur even if everyone understands the meaning, it is often a way to control or exclude the other person. I dislike that. I do not feel respected or valued by that, and I try not to do it to others. I may clarify--for example some folks have done audio of graphic novels, so clarifying allows me to understand if we can discuss the visual art or not. But, in general, I think allowing us to all talk about "reading" no matter what sense organ is involved, is a way to remove barriers, which I appreciate.

I think YouKneeK said what happens for audiobooks for me. I can often hear my own internal narration whenever it conflicts with how the narrator portrays it. It's both killed a book (like sapping all the humor out of Odd Thomas) and it can really alter a book for me (like with Shadowshaper) in a positive way. I generally prefer the way I hear it, but the rigors of adulthood mean that it's rare I get to just stop and sit with a book, so I do appreciate audiobooks as a way to always enjoy my favorite hobby.

As far as translations go, it is indeed different for me, because I can't "hear" the original. I can make somewhat informed guesses--like Memory Police, I could sense that it was very lyrical and atmospheric, but the writing in English didn't quite have the same smoothness, and City of Dreaming Books I got the vibe that it was quite Douglas Adams-y in its sort of absurdist humor, but the without the wordplay element, it wasn't quite as apparent and I couldn't even begin to fill in for either of them what it was I was "missing" since all I had to go off of was the text as presented.

Usually when I play an audio book its because... hold on i'm making a right hand turn. Okay, go back 10 seconds. So when I play an audio book it... was that a rattlesnake on the side of the road? Sorry, go back ten seconds.

But, when I open a book and read its... oh, what does crepuscular mean? I'll have to look that up...

I only listen to audiobooks on walks, and even with the few distractions of that setting, I can only handle 'easy' books. Serious non-fiction has to be in paper, not even in e-book.

Narrators, yeah, that's a whole discussion. Please, in your reviews, if you listened to a book, talk about the narrator! Even if you have nothing to say about the content, warn us whether the narrator(s) good or not!

I *loved* Patrick Fraley's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it enhanced my memory of the book so much, and made the dialects so much easier to understand.

But I do agree that listening as a 'series sampler' is a good idea. Or even a big book sampler.

Translations, oy. The English of A Man Called Ove was moved, and reset in England. I got no sense of Sweden at all, from the language choices.

I like the side-by-side translations, often done for poetry. For example Odes to Common Things was wonderful for someone like me, who knows just a tiny bit of Spanish, and I bet even better for someone who knows more.

Cheryl wrote: "I like the side-by-side translations"

Me too! Although I can't remember reading anything like that since high school, and yeah it was poetry.

Thanks for the warning about Ove, I'll have to read that one in Finnish.

Reading being something you do with your ears isn't a new thing.

"Do you read me? Over"

Due to my daily schedule I turned to audiobooks for about 80% of my reads. Since most of the time I'm listening in a language that still is more or less foreign to me this certainly makes it often more difficult for me to immerse in the texts, especially if it is a genre I'm not so fond of to begin with (space opera comes to mind here). Here I depend very much on the narrator. Unfortunately do a certain kind of space opera novels apparently use a certain kind of narrator - one I don't like the timbre/voice acting of. So it could be that I like some of those books less than when I would have read them. But I think even with a printed text it would never have reached a 'love them' status.

So my impression after two years of intensive audiobooking is that a bad (and here 'bad' is read as 'I don't like it') narrator can draw down a mediocre book, but can't ruin a good book. The only exception to this so far is "Lonely dove" where I was told that the book is excellent, but the narrator made me throw it out of the window (well metaphorically speaking of course).

On the other hand is a good narrator able to completely enhance my experience up to a point where in series I don't want to change to the printed version anywhere along the way because narrator and story have merged for me into one unseparable being. I.e. I dearly want to know how the 'Shadows of the Apt' series concludes, but I will patiently wait till the next audiobooks are out, because the narrator here is just so freaking genius.

And I'm pretty sure I have rated some books in the past higher than they actually deserved because I just was so in love with the voice of the narrator.

For translation I can't say that I have encountered anything obstructive so far. Since I don't know the original I will never know if the prose has been alienated or not. English as well as German translations feel most of the time pretty good for me.
It was only with our last BotM that I had the feeling that the English translation perhaps hadn't been up to the German original - but for this I should have read both.

So to answer Allison's questions from the start: I don't compensate for perceived viewpoint impacts. In most of the books so far where I didn't like the narrator I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have loved the book in the eye read anyway.

I agree with Gabi, a well done Audiobook narration can enhance the experience of a book, making a good book really awesome, while a boring book can not become much better even with a good narration.

As far as translations go, most translations to Portuguese I've read were all right. Now and then I came across a translation so badly done that I preferred to read the original in English instead. Self Published authors sometimes meet people in the internet who offer to translate their books without having the translation knowledge or even good Portuguese to begin with and perhaps this is what happened to those books. I came across a couple of such cases as people asked me to check if a translation had been well done.

What also happens is that people will sometimes translate books themselves when there isn't a translated book yet, so these are poor fans being over industrious over a publishing industry in difficulties that doesn't translates enough books for their readers. The number of English books that aren't translated to Portuguese is astounding, especially when it comes to Brazilian Portuguese. And equally astounding is the number of really good Brazilian books that were never translated to any other language.

I am surprised to see so many people have experience with bad narrators. I would have assumed most would hire skilled professionals.

Are bad narrators usually a matter of taste? i.e. you might not like it, but others do? Or are bad narrators usually agreed by most to be bad narrators?

I linked to the best/worst narrators thread in msg #12, if you take a look, you'll see that it's very much a matter of taste!