Matching the reader to the book - opinions

Hey everyone, I was listening to an audiobook not too long ago that was decidedly British in setting, tone, and language...but the reader was 100% west-coast Americano in their accent. This bothered me and pulled me out of the book. Yet it never bothers me if male readers read first-person POV books with female protagonists (or vice versa).

What do you feel about matching the readers with the audiobooks?
Have you ever felt a reader was wholly inappropriate for the book?

The reader is very important, as you say it's possible to cope with women reading men's characters and vice versa but there are definitely differences that I can't cope with. I would expect a British set book to be read with a British accent - and there are plenty to choose from! - and an American set book to be read with an American accent. (I'm British so I can't detect many different American accents well enough to know where they come from.) However I wouldn't want a French set book, say, to be read in English with a French accent - and I can't understand enough French well enough to listen to a book in French. I alwys think that I can detect an American reader using an English accent, but then I obviously don't notice the ones that do it perfectly!

I have, in the past, stopped listening to a book when I haven't liked the reader, not necessarily because it was badly read but because I haven't liked the reader's voice. When I'm buying an audiobook I always listen to a sample first but if I'm borrowing from the library I'm less fussy! I've also listened to books that I wouldn't have expected to like merely because I do like the reader's performance.

lol. I used to do volunteer reading for Librivox (similar to Project Gutenberg, but for audiobooks) and there was one reader that I swear could murder me and I wouldn't mind so long as he narrated it!

It's interesting about the foreign language observation though - I think I whole-heartedly agree; I wouldn't react as well to - say - Les Miserables narrated by someone speaking English with a French accent (even if the accent was completely legitimate) than I would if it were an American or British accent.

I once read a book where the narrator had a strong Boston accent. Too bad it had been made clear that the main character was originally from California!

The audio book Good Morning, Mr. Mandela by Zelda la Grange is read by the British actress (of Ghanaian decent), Adjoa Andoh. Zelda la Grange is an Afrikaner woman who was Nelson Mandela's personal assistant. Many of the listeners have complained about this because the accent to very false. There are numerous South African women who could have done a much better job.

I quote from one of the reviewers on the Amazon site:

Warning! Adjoa Andoh's reading of this book is absolutely dreadful. She should have read it in her normal voice, not in a phoney "Afrikaans" accent, which is not only inaccurate but inconsistent and unconvincing. And while she's about it, how about learning how to pronounce names correctly, instead of butchering them the way she did. She doesn't even pronounce the author's name correctly, let alone Nelson Mandela's name. And her rendition of names such as Beeld, Vergelegen, Strydom and so on is nothing short of disgraceful.

Having said that, if you have to listen to the audiobook and are willing to put up with the author being insulted for 14 hours, the story is fascinating. Rather get the print book or the Kindle edition. The audio book is a fiasco.

I listened to The Eagle has Landed last year, and of course the narration and some characters were British, but I was scratching my head that the German characters also spoke with a British accent. I saw it as a detriment to the story.

You have to admit though, Germans speaking with a British accent is infinitely better than Germans speaking "vith very fayke Jhermin aksents" a la the Freudian accents sitcoms like to give any and every person in the psychology field.

Edit: I suppose cinema has desensetized me to people speaking with British or American accents. I was reading a Cracked article on anachronisms in movies and the article mentioned some Roman epic using the term Scottish, when that term didn't exist yet. Someone pointed out that neither did the English language, but no one watching the movie complained about that!

That's been my sometimes problem with Librivox, Americans reading books set in England entirely featuring English people. There was also an instance of a very elderly sounding woman reading an old children's series which really didn't work.

Not that similar things don't happen with professionally produced audiobooks, of course. The Long Mars and books in that series are set almost entirely in US and almost all the characters are Americans (I think there's only one Brit in the first book and they were super minor and didn't appear in the second or third books), yet the reader was British and then had to put on an American accent constantly (and they were not convincing). The authors being British shouldn't dictate the reader, the book material should.

I do admit I've gotten so used to British accents in regards to books about ancient Rome that I have a lot of trouble adjusting to Americans reading those books. It's silly, but there you are.

There are enough audiobooks available that I just won't put up with a bad or mis-matched reader unless the book is extremely short (and sometimes speeding it up through Overdrive makes it bearable).