What are you reading in 2025?

[Cadence]

That’s an easy one. Soft g would be a more correct, Spanish pronunciation, whereas hard g is anglicised. I would pronounce it with a hard g.

Apparently a lot of variants of it...

Los Angeles - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(I wonder how common all of them were).

 

[Autumnal]

A lot of the errors I have heard are old fashioned terms in historical fiction, or English characters using US/Australian pronunciations, and, of course Raymond Luxury Yacht is often pronounced wrong.

Come on. How hard is it to say Throatwarbler Mangrove?

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I remember a British radio production of The Shadows Over Innsmouth which was great except the pronunciation of Innsmouth as inns mouth was grating to my New England native ears.

Took me a while after moving to Mass as a young 'un to learn that in New England, not everything sounds like it's spelled. For example Wuhstah for Worcester (not Worse-ester)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have noticed that audiobook readers sometimes pronounce things wrong themselves though.

One of the audiobook readers did such a bad job with one of the Walter Mosely books that apparently Audible has now removed it from sale, after the massive review-bombing.

For crying out loud, look up how people in a real world city pronounce local locations. Especially with Mosely's work, the specificity to Los Angeles is a big part of his Easy Rawlins books.

 

[prabe]

One of the audiobook readers did such a bad job with one of the Walter Mosely books that apparently Audible has now removed it from sale, after the massive review-bombing.

For crying out loud, look up how people in a real world city pronounce local locations. Especially with Mosley's work, the specificity to Los Angeles is a big part of his Easy Rawlins books.

While it can be a lot of work, it's part of the gig. Where I worked, the narrators didn't get paid to fix things, it was on them to get things right the first time if they didn't want to work for free to fix them. I have no idea what sorts of policies are in place elsewhere.

 

[Autumnal]

One of my first Audible books was a reading of The Brothers Karamazov. The reader…you know that wheezy sort of super snooty upper-class British style that Peter Ustinov could do? This was that, only more so. It sounded like the poor guy was being strangled and was genuinely unlistenable. It was withdrawn from circulation and removed from my library. A few years later, when the audio book’s publisher put out a new, very good reading, and it appeared in my library one day. Only time that ever happened to me.