Reading in Reykjavík

I first read Bet Me in 2005, and it has been on my list of regular rereads ever since. As I have been moving towards multitasking while I "read", I decided to get the audio version, and I have no regrets. This is actually my second listen - I also listened to it back in 2018 when I first got it. This is just to add some notes on the narration, as I have already reviewed this novel. Read my original review to see what I thought of the book. The narrator, Deanna Hurst, does a good job of the reading, and one never confuses the characters, as she gives them different enough voices that once you get used to them, you never have any problems telling them apart, but she also doesn't exaggerate them, which is good, because while this book has some funny moments, it isn't a comedy in itself and I have occasionally listened to audiobooks where the narrator exaggerated thins so much that it sounded like slapstick. Her voice is well-fitted to the often rapid-fire dialogu...

This isn't a review of the book, as much as of the narrator of the audio book version. Artists in Crime is among of the better of Ngaio Marsh's Chief Inspector Alleyn novels, and one of the ones I occasionally reread - not so much for the murder plot, which is gruesome and more than a little melodramatic, albeit clever - but for the romance. It's not a romance novel per se, but the side plot concerns Alleyn's very tentative courtship of his future wife, artist Agatha Troy. They had met in a previous book, where he was interested in and attracted to her while she was in equal parts intrigued by him and annoyed with herself for being so. In this book we get to see how she begins to accept that she has feelings for him, and he to have some hope that she may reciprocate his feelings for her. It is not the same breathtaking romance arc as in contemporary author Dorothy L. Sayer's detective novels, to which some have drawn parallels, but is quite satisfying even so. ...

I have long held a prejudice against certain audio books. Not for the common reason that listening to books is “cheating” – I grew up listening to the daily reading of books on Icelandic Channel 1 radio, and loved it. No, it’s because so many of them are abridged, or worse, retold. Imagine taking Jane Austen’s famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice (one of the most recognised in English literature): “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”, and changing it to something like: “It is a well known fact that a single, rich man needs a wife”. I can’t remember the exact wording of the mangling, but this invented example is quite as bad as the one I met with on starting to listen to what turned out to be a retelling of P&P (nowhere did it say so on the packaging). Needless to say, I returned the tapes to the library without bothering to listen to any more. In spite of my aversion to abridged books, I can li...