Old Books, New Readers discussion

Here is the link to the excerpt. I'm about to go watch it, and I'll be sure to post what I think! I hope you all enjoy it. Please post any thoughts, comments, criticisms, whatever about it so we can get some discussion flowing!

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/07/02/a...

There are a lot of people entering, which is fantastic, I hoped you all would be excited about the oppurtunity, but I know Simon & Schuster is hoping to get some conversation going about the performance, and they were hoping it would start here. Please take a look at the excerpt, especially if you've entered, and let us know what you think! It should be great, especially since the excerpt looks to be a video instead of a recording, and Alan Cumming is a wonderful actor!

Writting this as I listen to it, so these are my notes.

OMG a scottish acent, I love him!

Creeps with a rolled "s"?! Amazing.

Wow he is really embracing and playing every charter, not just reading the lines in different voices, but really acting.

Scottish accent!

The language is a little hard to understand, but that is just Shakspears in general, but it might be easier to understand if you were reading it and could take breaks to think about what he is actually saying.

"The raven himself is horse"- so full of feeling.

It is so full of emotion, you can feel the dispare and ergency between the two lovers, although who they are I am still trying to figure out.

So there are my thoughts as I heard it. My over all opinion is it is going to be great, and I really want to hear the rest of it.

I just listened to the extract. The main difficulty I have with listening to, or watching any Shakespeare performance is that you don't have time to linger over the words, or to re-read lines that you particularly enjoy reading; but of course Shakespeare wrote the plays to be performed, not just read, so that is a minor complaint really. With the Cummings version, although I know the play well, I still found it difficult to know which character was speaking. The voices were not sufficiently different for me to, as the saying goes "suspend my disbelief" and pretend I was listening to different people speaking. I didn't feel able (or enabled?) to place myself in the situation as I might have been if each character had been played by different people. I'm afraid it was, for me, just like listening to someone reading a story, albeit with passion and expression.

The hardest part fo rme was jsut understanding the language. Old English is hard to listen to and know what people are saying. In book form you can re-read like you said and figure out what is going on.

Hi!

Hope everyone is enjoying the giveaway and thank you for all you comments! My name is Susan Lee, the contact from Simon & Schuster, and I am so happy to see everyone’s comments and opinions on the excerpt.

I would like to add to this discussion and ask some questions so that we may get the conversation going and see what everyone thinks about the performance. What do you think of the audio excerpt from Alan’s performance? If you were tackling Shakespeare solo, what play would you choose?

When I first listened to audio excerpt I felt chills going down my back. Alan Cumming was able to make the voices for each character distinct and the tone he used fit the play perfectly. I read Macbeth when I was in high school and I was never able to fully grasp the voices of the characters but Alan does it perfectly. He made each character unique so I was able to keep track of the characters with little difficulty. If I were tackling Shakespeare solo I would definitely choose Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. It is my favorite play by Shakespeare and I would love to see someone act out all the different and unique characters. I would love to see how someone acts as the brother and sister while the sister is pretending to be the brother.

I am so excited to see what everyone has to say!

Thanks
Susan

I loved his voice! I cannot say how much I wanted him to never stop talking. His emmotion came through so beautifully. He reminds me a little of one of my favorite actors Tim Roth.

If I were to take on a Shakspears play I would pick Tamming of the Shrew. It is so funny and playing both the Lordly husband and the indignant wife would be awesome.

This was great! It's like a different work when performed instead of being read.

Now, I'm completely new to audiobooks, have never heard one before, and I have never been the greatest at interpreting Shakespeare when I read it in my head. After listening to the excerpt, it was great to hear the inflection and tone of his voice to understand the meaning behind Shakespeare's words. Plus Alan Cumming did an excellent job in portraying different characters. It sounds like a great audiobook!