icequeen wrote: ↑December 6th, 2019, 9:37 pm
Praise received for
Sue Anderson (Sue Anderson) from our
'Thank a reader' feature:
You made me fall in love with Gertrude Stein, though I don't recall reading any of her words. Excellent choice for the latest Nonfiction Collection! Now I must investigate her!
Your readings for both of your entries for this collection were inspiring! Your voice is so pleasant, smooth, clear, and easy to follow. I'm wondering how you prepared yourself to do so well, and what suggestions you have for us new readers.
Thank you for making my whole body shake with laughter as I read about the new stove: when the narrator recommended how the friend should behave when her husband raged, and when her friend followed the directions. Marvelous reading!
All of Sue's recordings!
Thanks for your nice comments about the two recordings I made for the 70th volume of the Non Fiction Collection. I'd had never read anything by the great 19th century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton before -- put off, I think, by the way she looks in her photos, all those white ringlets. Dipping into her prose was a revelation for me. Her feisty humor in recounting how she prodded her neighbor to buy a new stove was infectious. Also, that story hit directly at my gut, since the oven on my decrepit old gas range had stopped working some many months ago, leaving me pizza deprived. After reading Stanton, I literally jumped in my car and headed off to Lowes. Now, I can eat pizza and, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote,
"madam [is] jubilant with her added comforts and that newborn feeling of independence one has in assuming responsibility."
Gertrude Stein is another woman writer I felt I should have read, but had not, except for
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein's style generally leaves me itchy with impatience. So, again, in the spirit of "self improvement" I decided to read Mabel Dodge Luhan's critique of Stein. Dodge writes:
"In a portrait [Stein] has finished recently she has produced a coherent totality through a series of impressions which, when taken sentence by sentence, strike most people as particularly incoherent..." Dodge then given this quote from Stein to illustrate: "It is a gnarled division, it is not sinking to be growing, it is not darkening to be disappearing, it is not aged to be annoying. There cannot be sighing. This is this bliss." Well... to know if this paragraph produced a "coherent totality" in my mind, check out my website:
http://audiobooks.oliveandseablue.com/autobio/women/post-impressionism-in-the-prose-of-gertrude-stein/
As to suggestions for new readers... the best thing I can suggest is, after you have what you think is a finished recording, sit down with a cup of coffee (or in my case I take up my needlepoint) and listen to the recording as if it were recorded by somebody else. Aside from catching stray mistakes you missed in editing, you'll hear those places where you don't "come in clear." By not "coming in clear," I mean, things like lost consonants at the end of words and words that run together ["She wuduh" for "she would have" and such.] You can just note these speech patterns as things to pay attention to on the next recording.
But I wouldn't worry about your recording voice. Most of us here at LibriVox do not have voice training. I certainly do not. I like listening to different voices, different accents. That's what makes Librivox recordings so enjoyable.
Best wishes,
