1984 & Animal Farm

2 in 1

By: George Orwell

Narrated by: Benjamin May

Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

Bringing the Best of George Orwell's 1984 & Animal Farm together.

Nineteen Eighty-Four:

A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel. A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel's hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions - a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel - a scathing satire on a downtrodden society's blind march towards totalitarianism. The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell's masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.

©2021 George Orwell (P)2021 Page2Page

Good, but editing blows

Like others said, the editing stinks. Lots of mistakes, chapters repeated, narrator practicing pronunciation. Not his fault. Editor-errors.

It was almost perfect…

The story is great at showing how socialism could be started I haven’t finished 1984 yet but I have read animal farm before.
My problem is with the narrator. He pauses between each word as if to read it before he says it. This is very distracting, when you speed it up to x1.1 it fixes it but there are some points where he reads just fine and because he talks so fast (this is why I noticed the pauses) it sounds like he is trying to speed read.

Astonishing

To reflect about it. Many people do not value what they have until they lose it.

Both stories are enjoyable listens

Benjamin May did a great job reading these two books, both of which I enjoyed immensely. His character voices and pacing felt appropriate throughout both stories. Both of these stories are very important reads today, both for the insight they provide and so that you will recognize if someone is being wise or dense when they compare element of modern society to the societies in these stories. There were a few times that I felt the audio clips had been poorly strung together, such as one time in 1984 where the end of one audio clip overlapped briefly with the beginning of another. That didn't really impact my enjoyment of the reading, though. The whispered voices for Winston and Julia in 1984 were occasionally much quieter than the surrounding narration, which was mildly frustrating at times. Still, I think the performance for both books was overall good, and both stories are worth a listen.

The actual books and narrator are great, but.....

This version of the books is full of editorial mistakes, glitches and even a whole section of the books is read double. This gets pretty annoying at some point.

A depressing classic

A complete must read/listen.
But oh boy - is it every depressing.
And who would have guessed that modern dictatorships would use this as a guide…

We truly are in 1984

I am not sort of philosopher, nor artist myself. However, the story in 1984 of warning is upon us. To the fact that I agreed with Sacha Baron Cohen. God help us all.

Also on Thai particular edition of 1984, you get 2x the books and the reader is quite fast paced at 1x speed. I chose this intentionally.

a good reading with significant volume issues

This is a classic book that was read well and has good pacing and voicing. The only real criticism I have and it is a significant one is that at times the narrator speaks so softly to the point that I couldn't understand what he was saying. this happened when one of the characters was whispering or for some of the characters and it's incredibly annoying and I would have to increase and then decrease the volume throughout the book. If this can be recorded again and resolved I would have a five star performance for the narration. The book itself is a classic and I enjoyed it, but don't think I can offer anything more insightful here than has been said by many others over the decades.

Please redo audio engineering

Great stories and great performance, but strangely a German Audible intro and closure and lots and lots and lots of editing mistakes. Words disappearing between fade out and fade in of audio samples, narration overlap, double chapters, rehearsals, very sloppy and quite fairly annoying. Please re-edit because this is not at all the audible standard I am used to.

A Production Failure

Let's get the easy stuff out of the way. It's 1984 and Animal Farm. Classics. I'm not going to dispute them because everyone knows what they're getting into when they read these books. The gripe I have is with the narrator and the production.

The narrator is fine for most of these books, however is extremely unpleasant for specific voices, most of which involve shouting. There are several sections that have him going back and forth between shouting and whispering, and the audio levels aren't normalized so you have to turn up the volume to hear what he's saying one second then get your eardrums blown out the next. Especially in Animal Farm, his voice for Squealer is horrible, screeching, and loud in comparison to his normal narration.

I don't know if it's the microphone they used or the editing, but the narrator's voice fades out on certain words and then pops back in, causing you to miss key words sometimes.

There are multiple times the editor left in alternate takes, and in Animal Farm there is an entire 5 minute section that just repeats itself. And the Audible tag on the ending isn't even in English. Did anyone even listen to this before releasing it?

If there are literally any other options to listen to these books, I would recommend you explore those before putting yourself through this experience.