Of Books and Audiobooks: Katherine Addison

When I first read it years ago, I loved Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor from the start, and if possible, loved the audio version more: the reader, Kyle McCarley, is excellent, and with a world of elaborate and unfamiliar names and words and naming conventions, audio is a blessing. I have listened to it many times since, far more often than I have read the print version (though I do that, too).

The Witness for the Dead is not a sequel, but the story of a supporting character from the first book, Thara Celehar, and as such is performed by a different reader, Liam Gerrard. Also very good, both book and audio!

And now The Grief of Stones, the sequel to Witness, is just out, and in addition to reading the hardcover (gobbling it up, in fact, and then starting again), I of course got the audio version and am listening to that as well.

Which is all to explain to you how I knew instantly that this reader pronounced Cstheio Czireizhasan differently from the first.

I am not complaining, mind! The first story is from a different perspective than the next two, and I have no problem with having different readers, especially when Celehar's books are in the first person and Maia's is not. And of course there are valid reasons why characters have different pronunciations, are from different regions or backgrounds; the worldbuilding is deep and rich and ornate, words mean so much in Addison's books. Which of course I love.

(It's not like the situation with poor Martha Wells and book five of the Raksura books being read by someone who was not the reader of all the others, and while I don't blame the reader, it isn't his fault if no one told him, I started listening to it and the supporting character of Delin, who in the previous books had his name pronounced dee-lin, and had a high squeaky voice, was suddenly called dell-in and had a deep low voice, and I couldn't listen to it, the cognitive dissonance, if that's the right term, was too much for me.)

Anyway, I was delighted to find, in the book:

A reason to pull out this book, or rather this volume:

Do you know how often I come across a word I have never heard before? And that my mother has never heard before? Not very often! But here we are, with the characters going to give a deposition, and all of a sudden:

"He deponed and I deponed"? What? I knew what it had to mean from context, but what? But there we are: to testify.

Just what it had to mean. But I had such fun following up on that.

I probably sound like a nut, and I am: a word nut. But even if you aren't, they're such good books.