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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Stonehenge (Feb. 08)


Ugh! I hated this! Both the story itself and the narrator's voice (I did the audio book of this) were just plain bad. And I was really looking forward to this ... I've even been on the waiting list for a month or so to get it! The book I'm talking about is Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell. And that makes it even more disappointing! I've loved the other books I've read by this author, and his audio books have had excellent narrators up until this point. Here's what I didn't like:

About the narrator (namely Frederick Davidson) ...
  • his inflection was always off - characters seemed to whine or be very timid or hurried at moments when their words implied they should sound differently
  • his different voices all sounded similar, and they were all raspy and harsh, like you'd expect a shriveled old man to sound when he's on his deathbed - it was actually painful to listen to!
About the book ...
  • too much killing of children, especially babies, for my taste - I understand the idea of human sacrifice, but other books I've read had handled it better
  • not enough connection with the characters - I really didn't care what happened to them, as I didn't really like most of them
All in all, I pretty much tortured myself to get through all 20+ hours of this book. I just kept thinking "this is going to get better, really, it is, just a few more chapters and I'll be really into it." Alas that never happened. What a waste of 20+ hours.

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