The Talking Handkerchief, and Other Stories

Great book with various narrators of mixed quality

A LibriVox Listener

This book has some excellent stories of adventure in Asia, the Pacific and Russia during the Nineteenth Century. The author’s writing is exciting. However, some of the narrators are not particularly good and although the first narrator is quite good, the flagship story (‘The Talking Handkerchief’) suffers from poor audio equipment. It is certainly worth a listen though. The book’s format as an anthology means that readers can skip any narrators or stories that aren’t to the reader’s liking with ease.

mafinokc

Librivox is a great and noble concept, but the reality of its execution is often a letdown. Allowing pretty much anybody to read these works makes for extremely variable results. Many of these stories are exciting and are of the type not often found in contemporary memoirs. But the quality of the reading varies from pretty decent to atrocious. Lynda Marie Nelson is particularly bad: Her tone is monotonous, she frequently halts and stumbles over words as if she were reading them for the first time, and she absolutely mangles foreign words and place names to the point of their being barely recognizable. If you're going to read for Librivox, the least you can do is read the text first before you record it, and take the trouble to learn the correct pronunciation of unfamiliar words and place names. Lynda appears to have done neither. The sound quality of her recordings is also terrible. If it were up to me I'd reject her readings out of hand, but perhaps Librivox operates on the beggars-can't-be-choosers principle.