How Do You Listen?

Do you listen to books?  I do.  Anywhere and anytime.  I am very particular about the books I download on my MP3 player.  It dawned on me one day, that I can not listen to some books because of the narrator’s voice or style.   Why is that? 

Some narrators sound like they are reading while others make the words come alive and they become the characters.  A great example of characters coming alive is  “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” read by a group of actors -  Paul Boehmer, Susan Duerden, Rosalyn Landor, John Lee and Juliet Mills. 

In my mind, Kate Reading is Kay Scarpetta and Lorelei King captures Stephanie Plum.  Titus Welliver (an actor in “Deadwood”) reads “Brimstone” a Robert Parker western.  If push came to shove, I would say my favorite narrator is Frank Muller.  He reads many Stephen King and John Grisham novels.   

How can you search by narrator?  Enter the narrator’s name in the Creator field of the Overdrive search.  In an Overdrive Blog, the author recommended the following narrators:  Tim Curry, Jim Dale, George Guidall, Garrison Keillor, John Lithgow, Simon Prebble, Barbara Rosenblat and Lynn Thigpen.  Our collection does not have all of these narrators but the collection is slowly getting larger.

I confess, after I listen to a new “voice” I do a search at www.imdb.com to see what the narrator looks like and discover the narrator appeared in many episodes of “Law and Order”.  Who do you like to listen to?