{"id":20991,"date":"2023-08-04T13:25:19","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T18:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20991"},"modified":"2023-08-04T13:25:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-04T18:25:19","slug":"reading-aloud-the-scholomance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2023\/08\/04\/reading-aloud-the-scholomance\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading aloud: The Scholomance"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Speaking of books, I have been reading Naomi Novik\u2019s Scholomance<\/cite> series to my household over the last weeks, and I have been enjoying doing that a lot. So I thought I\u2019d write about it. With spoilers. At least mild ones.\r\n

First of all, I\u2019ve been enjoying re-reading the books. This is my\u2026 fourth time reading the first book? I re-read it before reading the second one, and I re-read the first two before reading the third. Anyway, I\u2019m pretty familiar with it as a story, and I am pretty familiar with the characters.\r\n

OK, here we go: the protagonist, El Higgins, grew up in rural Wales with her Welsh mother, and I am using a terrible, terrible Welsh accent for her, and I have no regrets about that at all. I am having so much fun with her dialogue. Also fun\u2014voicing Orion as a California surfer dude. I know he\u2019s from New York, and it\u2019s certainly hinted that his parents are both old-money New Yorkers, and it is never hinted in any way that he talks like a surfer dude, but also: he\u2019s a big dumb sweet-hearted inarticulate lummox of a guy (through most of the series) and the surfer dude thing works really well. It\u2019s possible that my listeners have focused overly on what an idiot he is, but also they have properly focused on what an idiot he is.\r\n

Less good: I started out doing Aadhya with a generic (terrible) South Asian accent, because her family is clearly from South Asia. But (a) my South Asian accent really is terrible and not reliable, and (2) it is based almost entirely on British\/Pakistani voices besides, and while I can never remember where Aadhya\u2019s family is from (it is mentioned only once, I think) it is not that part of the subcontinent, and (iii) Aadhya herself grew up in New Jersey in an aggressively assimilationist household and would absolutely speak with the accent of an overeducated mid-Atlantic kid. On the plus side, she doesn\u2019t sound like anyone else<\/i> in the story, but on the minus side, she sounds terrible, and the rhythms of Novik\u2019s dialogue don\u2019t match how I\u2019m speaking. Also, for some reason, I started reading Chloe with a New York\/North Jersey accent, when she really ought to have an upper-crust Roosevelt sort of accent, and now I\u2019m stuck with that, too. I can use the Roosevelt for Magnus, at least. Although I should probably have saved Roosevelt for Orion\u2019s parents, now that I think about it. Hm.\r\n

Liu, well\u2026 I did not attempt a Chinese accept for Liu, whose first language is Mandarin but who is entirely fluent in English. I do Liu\u2019s voice with my tongue very far forward, such that her consonants are very mushy, which gives her a kind of shyness or diffidence that I like for her. I also, more or less without intending to, gave her a higher-pitched voice line than the others.\r\n

That\u2019s almost all the characters who have extended dialogue in the first two books\u2014Liesel appears and is my standard German war-movie accent\u2014not my cultured Austrian accent, which isn\u2019t any more accurate than the war-movie won but I do distinguish them. Ibrahim is from North Africa, of course, and Yaakov from Israel, and I do my best, but fortunately neither have much dialogue. Even Nkoyo (my attempt at East African) has surprisingly few lines. Khamis has a few more lines\u2014I don\u2019t have any idea what a Zanzibar accent \r\nYancy will be my very best Miriam Margolyes, of course, when we get to her. I haven\u2019t made decisions about some of the other Book Three characters\u2014other than having a vague feeling that Li Shan Feng should have a very deep voice.\r\n

Speaking of pitch\u2014I have got away from voicing the female-presenting characters with higher pitches than the male-presenting ones. Partially that\u2019s because the bulk of the characters in this book are between sixteen and eighteen years old, and partially because I don\u2019t feel really comfortable doing (or listening to myself do) high-pitched \u201cgirl\u201d voices. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a problem, although of course as the person reading, I wouldn\u2019t necessarily know if it\u2019s confusing to my listeners.\r\n

I\u2019m curious what y\u2019all think\u2014have any of you read any of them aloud, or listened to them?\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger was surprised by how little dialogue there is in the series, actually.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20991"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20993,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20991\/revisions\/20993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}