Wilkie Collins Again: Armadale

I need to get something off my chest, but first I want to say something topical:

Wilkie Collins wrote interesting secondary characters. I mentioned the maddening Miss Clack previously, and in Armadale, I have a few more to add to the list. The invalid, pitiful but for her outrageous scheming. The priest who shows nearly the only sense in the whole book. The man so broken by circumstances and mistakes that he latches on where he obviously doesn’t belong.

And the man’s villains are outstanding. Count Fosco in The Woman In White is wonderful, and Lydia Gwilt in Armadale is a whole different turn of amazing.

Okay, now I want to vent:

Why, dear Librivoxers, do a few of you seem to have no standards for your reading? I skipped most of a couple of chapters as I listened to this book, not because there was anything amiss with the story or its writing, but good grief, people, what’s with the reading?

• Please don’t use the worst microphone you can find.
• Please don’t turn your head away from the microphone as you speak, lowering your volume sufficiently that I have to turn up the volume and then GET BLASTED WHEN YOU TURN YOUR HEAD BACK TO THE MIC. Ahem.
• Are you a non-native speaker of English? It’s great that you like a book so much you want to read it. Could I ask you in particular to observe a few (probably inconvenient for you) extra measures of precaution?
  1. Please be careful to read all the words. I realize that some of our definite and indefinite articles may seem so gender-free as to be pointless, but they’re not optional.
  2. You are probably very familiar with all the words in the chapter you’re reading. There tend to be fewer halting cadences in your readings than in the readings of many native speakers. However, it would be really great if you could try to listen to someone else pronounce some of those familiar words. Someone who speaks English natively. Someone who learned it from English speakers. There are words that you so confidently and consistently mispronounce that it makes a nitpicker like me literally weep. The bigger problem is that it makes your chapter(s) very difficult to understand, and you can suck the joy from even so great a one as Wilkie Collins.
  3. Please don’t misunderstand me: I really do like that you’re reading, and in most cases, I love the sound of your voices. And let’s blame it on my slow brain, or the poor stereo system in my car, where I do most of my listening, but please, please hear my pleas.
• If you find yourself fumbling all the way through a chapter you’re reading, you have two options: edit the resulting file to clip out your rereading, or record it again. Seriously. I don’t mind dress rehearsal quality, but let’s act like there’s an audience out there.

Okay, please forgive that.