elizabeth

We loved the part where Set is trapped in a jar and keeps saying things like,

I listened to most of this with my son and we had a great time. Sometimes scenes were so funny that we stopped and repeated the lines over and over. He listened to it all. He had read the book first and enjoyed hearing the characters' voices. He laughed, he cried. Overall great book.

Okay, so it's not really a "classic", I don't care, I read this book 20 years ago (maybe 30?) and I enjoyed it as much time time as the first. Mayhem, dragons, dysfunctional family, dragons, music (as much as can be in a book), dragons.
When I listen to Anne McCaffrey I don't think about technical difficulties, grammatical errors, plot discrepancies or anything else, I just get lost in another world that has these amazing Dragons.
This book is darker than many of her others, but I still leave it feeling refreshed and optomistic that you never know what joy lurks around the next corner if you just keep trying.

I would not recommend this. Typically I love it when I can read a book where an author spends pages and pages describing something that is mundane, but somehow brings it to life. (Life of Pi comes to mind) Although the use of language was nice, I felt somewhat uncomfortable during this whole reading. Why is this man not speaking with a Japanese accent? What is the point of the story? (turns out, there isn't really one)
I'm sure some people might enjoy this, but I wasn't one of them.

It seemed weirdly incongruent that the reader did not have a Japanese accent. This seems to me like a quintessentially Japanese book and part of the whole point is that it is from the Japanese perspective. For the reader to speak like me is just disconcerting.

My son really enjoys these books, but he doesn't yet recognize many of the words when he tries to read the book for the first time. We enjoyed listening to this book together on a long car trip, I didn't get bored by it and could explain some of the action and what some of the words meant. Once he heard the book he was able to read it from the text. It really gave him reading confidence and taught him a multitude of new words and sentence constructs.