To Emote or Not To Emote...

Can you destroy a good novel with a narration that is over the top... or in one case, under the top?

I am reading Michael Curtis Ford's The Ten Thousand. Well, I am listening to it. It is debatable whether listening to books from the National LIbrary Service for the Blind is actually reading. If you ask Braille militants, any blind person who cannot read Braille is illiterate. I will only concede the point if the same person never learned to read print. I was reading at five, thank you, so I don't agree that losing significant sight but not learning Braille makes me suddenly illiterate.

But one point that comes up in any audio interpretation of literature is whether the narrator should turn the reading into a performance. I don't think anyone suggests that readers do so in a monotone, but how much is enough and not too much? I can't imagine listening to Edward Rutherfurd's Dublin Saga without the magnificent narrator and his facvility with all the accents. The reader for the Ford book, however, is so dour that I find myself wondering if the character telling the story, Theo, is as dour, and if I should interpret the story the same.

I am not crazy about Jean Plaidy, but reading her novel of Edward II I can't decide if it is really as bad as it sounds or if the narrator in this one is coloring it even worse? I expect it is both Plaidy and the narrator that have conspired to trivialize and camp up the story of Edward and his "Parrot". I got to the point where Piers Gaveston is about to be murdered, and I am not so sure I want to hear that sad event done in the narrator's flippant Bette Davis ren dition.

More and more of the books I "read" are read to me by a tolerable computer voice. It can be downright funny at times, how the speech synthesizer handles pronunciation. The kingdom in my own novel, "Críslicland" comes out as "C. R. Slickland"! Perhaps the straight un-emoted reading is what is best. I honestly don't know.