I'm an artist and I love listening to audio books while I draw but this one is simply impossible. I can't listen to it. For those of you who don't know, the first 3 books were read by Roy Dotrice while this one was read by John Lee, a man whose very name reflects the mediocrity of his performance.

I didn't realize how amazing Roy  Dotrice was until I started the first disc of this. This man is horrible. I know a lot of people will be polite and say something like "It's not that Lee is so awful, it's just that Dotrice was so good."

Not quite.

This is horrendous. He reads this work of art as if his listeners have all killed his mother and he has decided he will punish them by reading in the most over dramatic, camp-fire ghost story voice I have ever heard. It's not just that it's melodramatic, it's that it's melodramatic at the wrong places, as if the man has never heard of plot and character development and emotional turmoil and is trying to replicate them with some bizarre calculation that is very departed than what we humans experience. Not to mention that so many of the characters are simply indistinguishable whereas in the Dotrice reading he not only gives the characters different voices but people from the same regions and same families SPEAK SIMILARLY. Tyrion and Jamie actually sound like brothers!

I pity the person who listens to audiobooks because they have no other choice because this would be incomprehensible without my hard copy at hand. Not even not even a quarter through and I gave up and set it aside in angry, nerd disgust. In the end I had to kidnap someone, tie them to a chair and force them to read it to me aloud. This was very troublesome.
I'm an artist and I love listening to audio books while I draw but this one is simply impossible. I can't listen to it. For those of you who don't know, the first 3 books were read by Roy Dotrice while this one was read by John Lee, a man whose very name reflects the mediocrity of his performance. I didn't realize how amazing Roy  Dotrice was until I started the first disc of this. This man is horrible. I know a lot of people will be polite and say something like "It's not that Lee is so awful, it's just that Dotrice was so good. "

Not quite. This is horrendous. He reads this work of art as if his listeners have all killed his mother and he has decided he will punish them by reading in the most over dramatic, camp-fire ghost story voice I have ever heard. It's not just that it's melodramatic, it's that it's melodramatic at the wrong places, as if the man has never heard of plot and character development and emotional turmoil and is trying to replicate them with some bizarre calculation that is very departed than what we humans experience. Not to mention that so many of the characters are simply indistinguishable whereas in the Dotrice reading he not only gives the characters different voices but people from the same regions and same families SPEAK SIMILARLY. Tyrion and Jamie actually sound like brothers! I pity the person who listens to audiobooks because they have no other choice because this would be incomprehensible without my hard copy at hand. Not even not even a quarter through and I gave up and set it aside in angry, nerd disgust. In the end I had to kidnap someone, tie them to a chair and force them to read it to me aloud. This was very troublesome.