I gave myself nine chapters (two whole discs worth) of The Swan Thieves before I would have rather swerved off the road and into oncoming traffic before forcing myself to listen to any more of this book. I was really sad because this author wrote one of my favorite books of all time, The Historian. I also "read" that book by audio version and absolutely loved it! The audio book company used a full cast to read the book and every character had their own voice and everything! I was mesmerized throughout the entire reading. The Swan Thieves audio book promised a full cast again, with Anne Heche supposedly reading a part. I don't know, I never got that far. The nine chapters I listened to were only read by one guy, and it was insanely boring. Boring books do not make good audio books for people that listen while commuting. I seriously wanted to fall asleep at the wheel that's how dull it was.
The Swan Thieves is about a psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, and his patient who had tried to attack a famous painting in the National Gallery. There's a lot of talk about French Impression and at certain times in the story a woman with a French accent reads some old letters from the 1890's.
I know there's a lot of people that might like this book, and that's fine with me! Perhaps I would receive a different experience if I actually read it with my eyes, but it was not so good a listening experience. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, I might be conditioned to those crazy, silly vampire stories with lots of supernatural occurances and fighting with werewolves, and therefore found a book about real, normal human beings to be boring. I really need to try some other books. That's what I was doing with The Swan Thieves and it just didn't work out!
It's kinda like when I was a kid and my parents had to limit my obsessive reading of The Babysitter Club books. That's all I was reading, and Mom and Dad were a little concerned, as they should have been. (Those books are ridiculous!) The rule was that for every Baby Sitter Club book I read, I had to read four books of another child appropriate genre such as anything from the Christian Book Store, or any of those yellow Apple Classics books like Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Believe me, I read those four other books like crazy just so I could get my BSC fix.
Anyway, my point is that even though I've been reading too many vampire stories, The Swan Thieves was still a fail for me. If anyone else has a different opinion, I'd be happy to hear. Maybe if I'm convinced, I'll pick it back up and finish it someday.
I never finished The Historian (strange, because I really liked what I read) and I've looked at this book before and wondered if it would be good. It's amazing how some books just don't work well in the audio version. They have to be very vividly portrayed to keep one awake. Harry Potter and Isabel Allende's Zorro are two of my favorite books on CD.
ReplyDeleteI remember when The Baby Sitter's Club was all the rage! Lately I've been thinking about the kinds of things my very future children will read and hoping they will have more serious, scholarly pursuits than I did. I was all about the Pallisades Romance books from the Christian bookstore. Instead of sex they had conversion stories, but they were still pretty useless!