(no subject)

I've been downloading and listening to the LibriVox recordings of Frank Baum's Oz books. These are all in the public domain (as is everything at LibriVox) and are read by volunteers. Thus, the quality varies. I listened to The Lost Princess of Oz first, and it was not bad -- everything was read by one man who did an acceptable job. Next I listened to Glinda of Oz, and here there were different readers for different chapters, with wildly varying levels of success. The first several chapters were read by a young boy who I suppose did well for his age, but his delivery was not exactly captivating and it was hard to follow along. Some of the other readers had thick accents, some were good readers and some not actually very good. It was a little jarring to get a completely different voice for nearly every chapter, but after all, it's free and they were all donating their time to the project.

One thing that interests me about this project is that we've talked for several years about doing recordings of some of our Tai-Pan stories to put on the web somewhere, and I suspect it would work much like there LibriVox recordings do.

Currently I'm listening to a dramatic reading of Ozma of Oz, with different voices for each of the characters when they speak. This is the best presentation of all -- the people involved have done a very good job of giving each of the characters a distinctive voice -- even if the Hungry Lion sounds like a cross between Dirty Harry and Tom Waits. I'd recommend this recording to anyone. ^_^