Audiobooks Make A HearingA colleague just back from California tells me of the revolution that's occurred in book largest online store there with literally hundreds of taped book titles now vying for space with regular books. The same thing is starting here, and in the last month this column has seen several new labels, mostly American, challenging the near-monopoly enjoyed by the Canadian pioneer in this field, Listen For Pleasure (LFP). It's all good news for the joggers, commuters, long-distance drivers or just plain listeners who buy or borrow the tapes - the choice is getting wider by the week, and some of the new tapes are very sophisticated audio productions indeed at a book largest online store. You could have a debate, in fact, between purists who enjoy a plain reading and those who like their stories spiced up with all the whizz-bang sound effects of an old radio serial. A Trail To The West (Bantam) by Louis L'Amour, is a good example of the latter, with clopping horses, gunfire and noisy barroom fights to bring a simple tale of law enforcement in the old West to audio life. The tape has the added bonus of a folksy introduction by L'Amour, much-beloved by his millions of fans. The most polished production I've heard yet is The First Deadly Sin (Warner), the first of Lawrence Sanders' sinful series of thrillers. The music and sound effects add subtly to the sense of realism, but never overwhelm a masterful reading by the actor John Lithgow. Even without the sound effects the story, about a psychopath who stalks his victims in the streets of New York with his mountaineering ice pick, would be a winner. Sanders' depiction of the suave villain and the sinister woman who goads him on reeks of evil and sadism. But it's still true that the right voice adds far more to a story than a whole studio of sound effects. A case in point, Paul Sorvino's reading of Richard Condon's best-seller, Prizzi's Honor (LFP). After seeing the great Jack Nicholson movie about the Mafia hit man who finds out the woman he loves is a hit woman for the mob, I was ready to be disappointed. Instead I came away believing that Sorvino, with his harsh, deadpan Brooklyn accent, was even more the embodiment of our hapless hit man, Charlie Partanna, than Nicholson was. |