Archive for March, 2011

Narrators matter

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Once the weather turned sour around here a couple of months ago I decided to start walking to work rather than ride my bike in the rain.  The upshot (aside from not having to get in/out of my rain suit) is that I now have an extra 30 minutes each way to listen to audiobooks.  The extra time has really helped me nibble away at my massive backlog of novels.

I managed to get through all 11 books of the Horatio Hornblower series, plus Moby Dick in just under two weeks (thank goodness for 2x playback speed).  With so much concentrated listening, especially of books that have a large range of dramatic content, I’ve started to form some opinions about narrators.

Moby Dick came from LibriVox, a group that does all-volunteer productions of public domain books.  I was actually quite impressed with the reader.  He did a passable job of rendering the accents of the myriad characters in the book.  The dramatic interpretation wasn’t half bad either.

The narrator for all the Hornblower books was fantastic.  Not much more to say there.

Now I’m on the third book of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin saga.  The reader of the first two books was great.  I particularly like how he performed Stephen Maturin’s character.  Sadly, the publisher got a new narrator for the third book.  Think back to that episode of Gilligan’s Island where the Skipper pretended to be a woman.  This narrator’s rendition of Maturin sounds like that.  Uhm, sir, he’s supposed to be an Irishman raised in Catalonia.  And then there is how he is performing Jack Aubrey—he sounds like Charleton Heston playing Santa Clause. It’s horrid.

The pinnacle of recorded book narration is still Robert Inglis’ reading of The Lord of the Rings.  If you have never heard it, do yourself a favor and find those recordings.  His expert voice reading such expertly crafted prose is a treat.

Anyway, I know that no producers of these recordings are listening to me, but maybe my words will turn up on a Google search some day.  Guys, you have to get good voice actors.  It’s as simple as that.  This is especially true with books like Aubrey/Maturin where there are characters from five or more countries, plus half a dozen different dialects of English.  There are actors who can do this, and it is worth the money to pay them.

For the rest of the Aubrey/Maturin books I’m going to look for another production.  I can’t take another minute of this guy making rugged 17th century British sailors sound like lilting old women.

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Hornblower

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

One of my personal rules is that if I see a movie that was based on a book, I have to read the book.  Last year I watched the 11 part BBC series based on C.S. Forester’s books featuring Horatio Hornblower, so I had to read the books.  I just finished, and they were great.

The books take place during 20+ years of the wars between England and Napoleon.  Horatio starts off as a midshipman and slowly works his way up through the ranks by using his intellect, cunning, and daring to pull off victory after victory.

One thing that I particularly liked about the series is the amount of detail Forester went into about the times outside of battle.  It’s easy to write an action-packed battle scene, and all of the requisite thoughts going through the leader’s mind.  It’s harder to write about the mundane tasks of getting fresh water, preserving food, performing medical treatment, etc. and still make it interesting.  More interesting even than that are the parts about how Hornblower had to manage in between assignments—times when a naval officer was on half-pay.

When you read the Hornblower books you are faced with a choice of the order in which to read the books.  You can read the order in which Forester wrote them, or you can read them in the chronological order of the narrative.  Forester started the books in the middle of Hornblower’s career, added some more, then went back to the beginning, and then filled in some gaps.  Since I was reading them all, I chose to read them in chronological order within the narrative.  Forester seems to have changed his mind about some things along the way, and it was a bit jarring, but still they were excellent books to read.

 

“Mr. Midshipman Hornblower”

“Lieutenant Hornblower”

“Hornblower and the ‘Hotspur’”

“Hornblower During the Crisis”

“Hornblower and the Atropos”

“Beat to Quarters”

“Ship of the Line”

“Flying Colours”

“Commodore Hornblower”

“Commodore Hornblower”

“Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies”

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Who was that mast man?

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

The sailing season in which I race starts up in a couple of weeks and we had a work day on the boat today.  Yesterday’s gorgeous sunshine didn’t last—today was overcast and drizzly.  Despite the fact that we never left the marina, it was still a really great day of learning new stuff, working hard, enjoying the gentle rocking of the boat, and talking with friends I normally only get to see once per month.

The major task for today was moving the base of the boat’s mast forward.  Our hope is that by changing the overall attitude of the mast that we can make better shape in our mainsail and go faster.  Moving the mast was no easy feat.  It’s just over 61 feet of aluminum and insanely heavy.  To make it worse, the mast is bolted down to the floor of the cabin in the head, and stuffed in the corner so it’s really close to two walls.  Heavy, and crazy hard to get access to—the opposite of convenient.  We ended up lodging a 2×4 behind a structural frame in the v-berth, attaching a snatch block to it, and then running a line from the base of the mast through the block and then all the way back to the stern of the boat where we hauled on the rope using one of the winches.  Fortunately it worked on the first try.  The setup and tear-down was much more involved than the actual moving of the mast.

After that was the long an confusing ritual of tuning the mast’s standing rigging.  Those are the bits that center the mast, and keep it from falling over.  Six turnbuckles control it all, but it’s delicate work.  If the mast is bent to far to one side should you loosen that side, or tighten the other side?  Ask 10 sailors how to tune the mast and you’ll likely get 10 different answers—5 of which are correct, yet all of them will contradict all of the others.

The rest of the day was just going around and cleaning, taking notes on future work to be done, and thinking ahead to the first race of our season.  Let’s hope we can go fast this year.

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