Audiobook Narrator Spotlight: Robin Miles

Actor, audiobook director and performer Robin Miles has narrated hundreds of audiobooks. Miles has the ability to convincingly recreate a huge range of speech patterns and accents, conveying more about a character than comes across through their words alone. After an experience narrating the horror book The Good House by Tananarive Due, she realized she could leverage this ability to take on more audiobook work in the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy genres, whose stories typically require more range to portray a large diversity of character-types and voices. Robin Miles is now an industry legend, and a recent inductee of the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. Here are a few titles read by Miles in the collection:

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

In 1927 and 1931, author Zora Neale Hurston met and interviewed Cudjo Lewis, the last person alive who had been enslaved and transported from Africa as part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A Peak Pick!

That Encouraging Voice in Your Ear

I’m a self help fan who hates reading self help books. When it comes to encouraging words, I want to hear them, preferably while I go about my household chores, tend my garden, or take a walk in the park. These encouraging little talks between me and my iPod are just the thing to add more creation to my recreation, or to revivify a draining commute. Here are a few recent self-help audiobooks written and read by seasoned performers that make for great listens.

Creative Quest, by Questlove.

Contextually appropriate audiobook narrators

Audiobooks are great. They are not cheating – they count as reading. They are also wonderful opportunities for more tangibly presenting the characters and tone of any particular work. Whether it’s an individual narrator, or a full cast with sounds effects and music, listening to a well done audiobook can really magnify your experience of a book.

I try to find audiobooks that are read by what I call “contextually appropriate narrators.” While I love the deep tones and rich textures of a British man’s voice as much as the next bookworm or theatre-lover, this voice-type isn’t always the best or only option available to convey the personality, emotion, culture, and experience of every story’s characters.

While this idea is subjective, it isn’t that subjective. Is the main character a person of color? Then the narrator should be a person of color. Is the book about Chinese people? Then the person reading should probably have Chinese heritage. Not every narrator will wholly represent an entire story and all of its characters, but I believe they should relate in some central way.

Book Bingo: Read Out Loud

Join The Seattle Public Library and Seattle Arts & Lectures for our 2^nd annual Summer Book Bingo for adults! Follow us throughout the summer for reading suggestions based on each category.

It is no surprise to anyone around the library that I love to read out loud. They even let me do it in public, twice a month! My wife and I used to read big novels aloud together – All the King’s Men, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov – and we’ve just started on Stephen King’s Dark Tower books – though these are hardly titles I’d suggest to those working on their Book Bingo cards. Parents or grandparents already reading aloud to children get a freebie with this square, but for others this category may be among the most challenging. A century or more ago, people read aloud regularly, as Verlyn Klinkenborg writes:

2016 Audie Award Nominees

-posted by Library staff

Award season isn’t over yet! Last month, the Audio Publisher’s Association announced the 2016 Audie Award Finalists and it is going to be difficult to choose winners from these amazing choices in 2015 audiobooks. The Audie is awarded to the best in the audiobook industry, in genre categories like “History / Biography” and “Humor” as well as performance categories like “Narration by the Author and “Multi-Voiced Performance”. Audie nominees are judged for performance, direction, production, and content. Listen to samples and read reviews for all the nominees here.

Being fairly picky about audiobooks–the pacing and tone of the narration has to be ‘just so’ or I’ll stick to print–I look to Audie nominees past and present for a handy selection of best bets. I often find books that I would not have considered reading in print, but that are in some way more compelling as a listen. In no genre is this truer for me than non-fiction. Here are few non-fiction highlights from this year’s nominees in various categories:

Best Humor:
Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari presents his research (with author and NYU sociology professor Eric Klineberg) on contemporary dating practices around the world, for which he travelled to Wichita, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and a Manhattan retirement community. Between fits of laughter, I learned quite a bit!