Self Reliance

It is a pity that this essay is read by someone with such a bad voice. The reading is slow and very very low. I listen a lot in my car, but I need to cut out aal the bass, to listen to this without having popping sounds.

I love reading Emerson, and Self Reliance has a great thought-provoking message written with elegance. However, this narrator not only delivers it with a lifeless monotonous voice, but also adds unnatural pauses between every few words. The pauses are out of sync with the sentence structure and make it real difficult to understand the context of the text. I got the sense that the narrator was just reading words like a computer would and did not understand what he was reading.
This text does require some brain power to comprehend fully as there is much packed into a concise package. This narration adds to the challenge.

Emerson is certainly one of the great thinkers of the American experience, however the narration of this text makes it quite challenging to get at the heart of Emerson's point. The narrator seems to lack the feeling and flow that would have really brought Emerson's words alive from the page to the listener's ear.

If you would like to have this Emerson classic as an audiobook, please please do NOT buy this version. The narration is absolutely awful. The narrator, while having good clear diction, reads the book as if there is a comma every third or fourth word. This becomes extremely tedious within a very short time. In fact, I would say it creates a barrier to understanding the content of the book, which was not written in modern english.

A good narration should be transparent and not get in the way of a book. However, in this case, the narrator's pauses every third or fourth word made comprehension of the content a struggle. It sounds like a computer is reading it. If I could have given this narration zero stars, I would have.

The only good thing I can say about this version is that is was really cheap and I didn't waste too much money on it. I will look for another version. The one enjoyment I got out of it was knowing I had the power to press the stop button on my player.