The Other Wind: A New Earthsea Novel

"The Other Wind" is another great book from Ursula LeGuin. Unfortunately, I found the multiple narrators and the random use of music distracting. I also agree with another reviewer who said the recording quality was poor. I think I would have enjoyed the book more had I read it rather than listening to it.

This is not a review of the book itself, but rather, the Recording quality, or lack thereof.

In the first place, the book is read in sections by half a dozen or so different people. This makes perfect sense if each reciter is taking different character(s), but this is not the case. Rather, 1 voice will do a section, often not even a whole chapter, and then another voice starts up for no apparent reason. It's absurd. All it succeeds in doing is making the story sound disjointed.

But, what is even worse is the horrible EQ applied to the recording. It's very thin sounding with far too much silibance, and the different voices makes it impossible to compensate with your own EQ.

I don't get it. When you stop to think of everything it takes to record an entire book unabridged, one has to wonder why they didn't get it properly recorded. It doesn't make it unlistenable, but it's not good. It's a shame.

When I first realized it was read by a group of people, I thought wow, they're going to have character voices. And, for the first time the 2nd and 3rd person spoke, they used narrator #2 and #3 for two separate characters -- but only for one line each. From that point on, narrators switched on and off within sections, within chapters, it seemed almost within sentences. I guess the audio book editor got lazy and decided not to have the narrators work together. Altogether, it's the sloppiest audio editing I've ever heard. The narrators aren't bad, but they switch on and off in a completely inconsistent and distracting way, with many sections that deserved to be re-recorded just going straight by. I was very disappointed by this. Ursula K. Le Guin's writing (and the narrator's voices) deserved better treatment.

I found this book to be just as nice to listen to as all the others in this series. i am greatful to be able to hear what i can't read any more.

I love the first 4 book and I like the ideas in this story. But this one felt more like an outline.

There are four or five narrators involved. They seem to change randomly from scene to scene, as if one narrator got bored and the next one came in to relieve him. You don't get a consistent narrator that you can just tune out nor do you get the performance value of actors voicing different parts. This was so distracting that I could not finish the book.

Slow and deliberate but intense. Beautiful story from a master storyteller.

Wonderful journey that Alder has to take. His wife died and now he dreams of the dead trying to break free. His wife kisses him from beyond death and the dead wants to cross over into Earthsea. Now Alder must find someone to help him with his dreams before he ends up doing some terrible thing. This leads him to King Arren and their quest to make everything right between the living and the dead. I enjoyed the plot twist, you never know what is really going on.