1/6 through the year is technically on the 2nd of March just before 8 p.m., so we all get a little more time on our first sextant than it first appears.
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Originally Posted by jbcohen
How far are you along in reaching your goals? At this point to be on track you need to be 1/6th to your goal, I am 1/2 way, in other words I am going along a lot faster than originally thought that I would go.
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I'm doing good almost entirely because of my increased audiobook listening; I've finished two ebooks and five audiobooks, putting me currently one ahead of schedule according to Goodreads.
I've hit a wall though since starting the Dune audiobook to work towards my winter goal of finishing Dune before the end of March. I had been choosing easier audiobooks and thought Dune despite its length would be easy enough too, but oh it is not. I generally prefer not to find out anything else about a book once I know I want to read it, so all I vaguely knew was that this was a sort of fantasy/sci-fi set on a desert planet that I had the impression of being colourful and fun. It may be, but trying to listen to all these weird names and the history and politics and strategies and war goals and schemes pretty much from the first is difficult. I've had to rewind and repeat so much and I'm still somewhere in the beginning. I am finally starting to understand more and go a little faster though, so I still think I'm on track; the book is just more complicated than expected.
Oh, and despite the good voice work, this audiobook only adds to the confusion. It has a main narrator with other actors voicing particular characters. Though it is 'unabridged', I have found by comparing it to online preview text that it actually cuts out tiny segments of the book. For instance, the book might contain something such as (I'm making this up but it's close enough) - "He said, 'Go,' gruffly and then laughed." The audiobook changes it the the actor only saying 'go' in a gruff voice and then laughing so you only hear the word 'go' narrated. I really don't know if other audiobooks do this but I realised it in this one because in the beginning there were long dialogue sections where the people were just talking back and forth to each other with absolutely no other narration but the dialogue and I thought that seemed odd for a book so I compared it to text online and found the truth. While I'm not terribly fussed about this since it is still more or less unabridged, it somehow seems a little disingenuous to me.
Besides that though, the main audio confusion is that the separate voice actors must have originally been hired to narrate for an abridged dramatised recording of the book, because some chapters contain the voice actors while others contain the single narrator voicing all the characters. It is very jarring and at first I was extremely confused. The first narrator-only chapter, I thought it was completely new characters and had to slowly and confusedly realise what was going on. While I like having an unabridged version and I like separate voice actors for different characters for greater immersion, I definitely do not like this frankenstein combo. I'd rather just have the one narrator do the entire book than have to switch back and forth.
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Originally Posted by issybird
I see Dune has several narrators. You can really crank it up for Scott Brick, is all I'm going to say.  |
I'm assuming since he's listed first that he's the main narrator. I've actually slowed down the narration for this to 75% so I have to rewind less, so it's like I'm listening to Dune on Downers.