I personally like reading aloud text. But the passage of text must have a lot of dialogue and action tags. Description can be minimal. I don't like reading through a passage of text that is highly descriptive of something because then I would have to close my eyes and really imagine it. If the text has a lot of dialogue and action tags, then I can at least hear myself talking like the characters and doing something and knocking on the table to sound like a door-knock.
I am open to anything, really.
I think I will work well with novels with a lot of dialogue, novels written in script format, play scripts, film scripts, puppet show scripts, comic scripts, graphic novels, graphic memoirs, etc.
by squashchunks
6 Comments
I’ve found the ‘Thursday Murder Club’ series really fun to read out loud (as I’m reading them together with family)
Theres a lot of conversing and dialogue, but also the narration is third person bias, changing slightly to reflect the focal character, and as a result has a conversational quality to it as well. also, they’re really good books imo!
All of Cormac McCarthy’s novels feel like they should be read aloud by a campfire.
Themis Files series would work really well for this! Lots of interview transcript and action sequences.
Milton’s Paradise lost /s
Any of the sagas or orally passed down classics might work. Mabinogion, odyssey, the poem of cid
Angels in American is one of the only plays I’ve sought out and enjoyed in my adult life. Too much Shakespeare in high school soured me on the whole theatre thing.
[Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29906980)
Well, if you like ALOT of dialogue, sparse descriptions, and narration that feels close to actual speech (if still idealized) try Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. It’s dark though. Some parts feel more comedic for sure, and there are some genuinely funny parts in the book, but it’s definitely a black comedy at most, and a depressing nihilistic slice-of-death book the rest of the time.
Gist of the book: 18 year old Clay goes back home to LA for Christmas break and finds himself picking right back where he left off with the drug abuse, meaningless parties, and wealthy excess of Hollywood’s ultra elite. The book doesn’t seek to answer questions. It truly feels like a dramatized snapshot of wealthy white Hollywood socialites back in the 80s.