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Old 02-23-2019, 09:51 AM   #92
Catlady
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum View Post
I think you listened to the book, as did Catlady, and I suspect the complexities of the plot would be made harder by that, rather than having a book where you could flip back if necessary.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel View Post
No, I read it. The audible version was read by the author, and that's rarely a good thing. Plus I've had enough experience with le Carre's writing to know it can be a bit hard to follow, so eBook seemed like the right thing for the first pass. If I'd enjoyed it, the plan was to do a second pass with the Audible book, but I obviously never got that far.
As far as I'm concerned, it's up to the novelist to make things clear enough that one shouldn't have to be flipping pages back and forth, shouldn't have to refer to text when listening to the audiobook, to follow a story. This wasn't a textbook, after all.

The reading itself was fine. Le Carre didn't do a lot of differentiation of voices, but he read in a straightforward manner that seemed to fit the text. My issue with following the story wasn't that I didn't know who was speaking, but that I didn't have a sense of who those people were in context and how they fit together.

Something as simple as datelines indicating shifts in the timeline would have helped enormously.

Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird View Post
I think series always eventually go downhill; the ideas get played out, the characters get stale, the continued action gets increasingly absurd. I think standalones have more life to them, as in this case.

I don't have to like characters; that's a matter of indifference to me. I want them to be interesting and consistent. That's enough.
What I like in standalones is that there's the possibility of the protagonist(s) being killed off; once something's a series, that's removed, with a subsequent lessening of the danger and tension.

I don't have to like characters either, but I need to relate to them on some level. I didn't in this book.
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