Review – Fritz Leiber Short Stories
I listened to three short stories by Fritz Leiber, a prolific speculative fiction writer in the mid to late 20th century. The stories themselves are alright. Perhaps, I didn’t like them as much because they are dated, perhaps because of the narrator that I found so annoying (he was actually doing a robot voice), I’m not really sure. This was another case that I’m sure I would have enjoyed the stories more if I had read them rather than listened. I did get the recordings for free from Librivox, who record public domain works.
I do want to say something about audiobooks in English in general, but it starts with a detour, so bear with me. My husband used to listen to lots of audiobooks in Russian that were read by a text-to-speech program. At 1.5x speed. I don’t know how he did it, it sounded atrocious to me. Whenever I would suggest he’d listen to one of the books I liked, read by an actor, he would say that the inflections and such actually bothered him. I never understood it, until I started to listen to audiobooks in English. To me, they sound like someone is horribly overacting, like I’m listening to an overenthusiastic 14 year old in a talent show reading a Hamlet monologue.
So yea, maybe it’s me, but if the description says that someone screamed something, I don’t want the narrator screeching in my ear.
Back to the stories, they were fine. I read The Moon is Green, Bread Overhead, and What’s he doing in there? which all range in tone from a little suspenseful to whimsical. So, I guess it’s a meh. But if you got some time, the links above are free access to the texts.
