The Sword and Laser discussion

Just caught up with the catch up of good omens. It seems that the audiobooks may not have served the material that well. I read this book first during high school and its one of the pillars of my general world view, but some of the criticisms here have puzzled me, in particular the too many characters comments. Veronica's thoughts that Adam was annoying must be based on the audio version as the 20 or so people ive shared the book with never said anything along those lines. Tom thought that the smoke and noise of Satan's arrival were transformed into Adam's dad's poorly maintained car, but there is a whole great paragraph about how diligently Mr Young maintained his car. My only explanation for how they got such a different take on things would be the audiobooks and the performance of the actor. This makes me wonder what ive missed in novels i have only listened to. I think part of the issue is that when I feel like i missed something i read, i reread the section in question, much harder to do in audio form. What do you guys think?

This is why I almost never listed to an audiobook for my first run at a novel. The 'benefit' of audiobooks is that you can do other things while you're listening, but doing other things is distracting! And when you're not paying attention you can miss things. I love audiobooks for reacquainting myself which books or for lazy(hungover) weekends on the couch when I'm just listening and doing nothing else but, put it this way, I studied English Lit in college, there's absolutely no way that an audiobook would have been a suitable alternative for my course texts.

I listened to the audiobook on this one, and feel that it never really engaged me for whatever reason. Someday I may actually read the printed version instead. I feel that I may have enjoyed it much more if I had read it. There seemed to be too many characters, not enough forward movement, and too much posturing. I normally enjoy Gaiman's books more than this. This was my first exposure to Pratchett.

I agree with Kate. I love audiobooks and listen to them quite a bit, but they rarely can match the focused rewards that a printed book provides.

I felt more engaged in the audio version of this than when I read the print a few years back, but this is probably because I kept pushing "back" instead of "pause" and heard a lot of it multiple times. *grin*

I can't really comment on the difference between the audiobook version and the print version of Good Omens because I've only listened to it, but there are definitely some books which cannot survive the transition from printed to audio.

The best example I've seen is Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings--I listened to it multiple times before finally finding it in the bookstore, and my jaw dropped when I saw how much care and art had been taken with the printed copy (especially since the same care wasn't taken with the audiobook--the two narrators clearly never talked to each other about how they were going to pronounce character names).

Now that I don't have a forty minute commute, I'm looking forward to getting back into physical books. :-)