The Camel Club

I can't say that political thrillers are my thing. I've read a few by Tom Clancy, but never really got hooked. Recently I saw David Baldacci on TV talking about 9/11 conspiracies (or lack thereof) in what seemed an intelligent manner. I was curious enough that I decided to pick up his book The Camel Club. I still can't say I'm hooked on the genre, but I still got through the six-hundred pages pretty fast. It was intriguing, at any rate. I appreciated the level-headed approach, and how the different sides are portrayed. It had more on Muslim politics and culture than I've read anywhere else. I have to admit I never knew half the stuff he mentioned. Quite fascinating, and definitely a current-events type of book. I think Baldacci has quite a touch dealing with such sensitive issues. The Clancy books I read were heavy into cold war politics, but Baldacci has to deal with a much more religious angle, and does it well.

As interesting as it was, it still wasn't the type of book that I can read every day. I was interested in the sequel (The Collectors), but decided to go with the audiobook.

Bad move. I've ranted about bad audiobooks before, and I'm going back on the soapbox today. The narrator is good. No problem there. There is no dialogue in the initial section, and the narrator does a good job with it. Then it shifts. For some reason, the producers decided to use three readers. The narrator is one, and there is another person to do the men's lines, and a third for the women. The person doing the men's lines is especially bad. I cannot get past his strong New York accent. This may not be fair, but I have always associated strong accents with poor education. I could see if one or two of the voices had this dialect, but they ALL do, and it's distracting. I m serious...the accent is comically strong.

Even so, this is not as bad as the choppiness that having three readers impart. There'll be a line of dialogue in one voice, and a tiny pause before the narrator cuts in with "she said," or something. I thought this was a very poor choice. Even if a man sounds unnatural doing a woman's voice or vice versa, it's still infinitely easier to follow a story with a single reader because it flows much better without the pauses for a new person to cut in. Now, I have listened to a few books with male and female readers before...I am thinking in particular of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and The Brief Wondrous Life of Ocar Wao by Junot Diaz. Both of these, however, had one reader do an entire segment. The Historian, for example, had separate chapters devoted to daughter and father. The daughter's section might be read by the woman, but she'd do all the voices and narration within the section. This is far superior than the broken-up bits and irritating accents of The Collectors...which I will not be finishing on CD.