Jen

This is one of my all time favourite novels. Colleen McCullough does historical fiction like no other, and leaves me wishing it was MY story. I love the epic nature of this novel, the story spanning generations, a different time, characters you wish you knew (or were).

This was my first listen to a book and although I wasn't blown away by the narrator, not once did it get in the way of my enjoyment of the story. I thought it would be difficult to listen to a book when I'm used to reading them, but for a couple of weeks this audiobook got me to work and back, and every day I had to force myself to turn off my car. In fairness, the only part of the narration I wasn't entirely happy with was the voices of the characters, but I imagine we all have our own ideas of how a character sounds.

Every time I read/listen to this novel, I'm hoping for a little more than I get - probably because A Tale of Two Cities is one of my all-time favourites leaving me in great gasping sobs near the end. Great Expectations is enjoyable enough, an interesting story with appealing characters, but I'm never quite moved to anything more than passing interest. Still worth a listen.

The performance was fine, though a little fast. Perhaps that's just me though, I generally need a bit more time to process Dickens.

Although this is a beautifully written novel, I was completely unable to care about any of the characters. Quite frankly, I didn't care if they were happy or sad, lived or died. I also found it incredibly irritating to have to listen to the same scene told from different viewpoints considering I felt no empathy for any of the characters. If I was reading this, I would have stopped part way through, but I'm still new to audio books so I haven't yet learnt to give up on the ones I'm not enjoying.

The narration was average, neither enticing me nor putting me off, though I did find I had to constantly change the volume.

Absolutely fantastic performance of a wonderful story - I couldn't have imagined it better, and I wouldn't change a single thing.

I found the author thoroughly irritating because he kept putting his voice into the story, talking about the writing of it. I'm sure there's some great literary reason for this, but it just kept pulling me out of the story. The storyline captivated me though, and it's stayed in my thoughts. Despite the irritating side lines from the author, this book was beautifully written and written in such a way that what might have been a fairly mundane story was instead transformed into something that felt incredibly personal and evocative. Narration was good, took me a few minutes to get into it but then I was hooked - this seems to be the norm for me with audio books.

I enjoyed this audio book, and it was lovely having the author perform it himself. With regard to the story, I had hoped for more about Steve Martin's life, but I suppose the title does suggest the fact that it is more about Steve Martin's stand up career than himself.