My wife never gives me book suggestions. We are very different people, which is one of the reasons that I think we work so well together. We both love to read and through our relationship we could be found reading in the same room, each on our own couch with a separate book. So when she suggested that I read “The Historian” I was intrigued. The way she described it to me or at least the way I interpreted her description was “A Historian's notes as he searches for Dracula.” This was enough to get me on board, in my head it was Indiana Jones or comic pulp monsters like those found in early Universal Pictures films. She mentioned that she got it on Audiobook but it was the abridged version and that she head there was a full version. This was great, I could get the full version from Audible and then talk with her about the differences.
The differences jumped out at once. The abridged version she had been listening to was approximately 12 hours. This is a long time but not when it comes to audio book. To give you an example, IT by Stephen King runs 44+ hours. The version I found was 26 hours, over double the time as the abridged version. This was great I thought, I get a lot more information and I will have so much to talk with my wife about.
The unabridged version of The Historian is read by two people, Justine Eyre and Paul Michael. Paul does a wonderful job as the Narrator's Father and with the many voices and accents he has to do with the story. I did have a slight problem with Justine as the voice of the Narrator, her voice is very young sounding and the narrator is supposed to be ~50. Now most of the narrator's voice is from when she was in her teens and it makes sense when choosing someone to voice a young person for them to be young, but as I was invested in the story it seemed out of place that I was being told about a person’s younger self in their own young voice.
The Historian takes us through three sections of time, each section having a separate main character. The narrator's father Paul, who most of the story is about, Paul's Professor in history Professor Rossi, whose adventures and letters open the book, and the narrator is who reading all these documents and putting them together in a compendium about Dracula.
The idea for this story is just awesome. Dracula, investigations, history, family crisis. All these ideas are awesome and when the book is hitting them it is engrossing and I did not want to stop listening. The treasure hunt of finding the tomb of Vlad Vlad Țepeș AKA Dracula, is a great mystery that the author must have spent a great deal of time researching. We are taken to multiple European countries in multiple different time periods. We go through Romania, Istanbul (not Constantinople) , sections of America and the United Kingdom.
Unfortunately this is where I had major problems with the unabridged version of the book. The good parts of the book were so good and the other parts lasted for 45+ minutes while the author described in aching details the contents of old manuscripts and the regions the characters are in. It reminded me a lot of Tolkien's “Lord of The Rings” when it comes to details about locations and back story. I would suggest that the author spent so much researching Vlad, the time periods, the Turkish empire, and Dracula that they did not want anything to go to waste, so they just included everything. Editing may have made this good book into a Great book. Infact, as my wife said to me when I told her about my issues with the book, the 12 hour version was so good I can not imagine that it is as bad as you say. I replied “Imagine taking your awesome 12 hour book and just adding fluff till it was 26 hours long. It probably would not be so awesome.” She laughed (as she usually does) and apologized. Honestly, this book took me over a week to get through, and every day or so I would lament how cool the cool parts were, and how long the in between parts were.
As far as a raiting? The 26 hour version from me gets a three outta five stars. It was good enough for me to want to listen to the whole thing and trying to figure out what was going on and how it would all come to an end. There has only been one book that I did not finish because it was so hard to listen to and this was no-where near as bad as that one. If you are like me, I suggest trying the 12 hour version.
No comments:
Post a Comment