Renee Rose’s wonderful Westerfield trilogy is now available on audiobook! Well they have been for a while now. In fact quite a sizeable chunk of her back catalogue is now available for your audible enjoyment. But it’s the Westerfields I’m going to talk about because they’re the ones I’ve listened to. Plus you all know how much I love them.
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| Available right here! |
I was a little bit unsure about listening to my favourite spanking fiction being read by somebody else. It feels unnatural, somehow. Books are my absolute number one medium of choice for delivering erotica. Anything film-based, for example, and I tend to get a bit embarrassed by it all. There are other people involved then, you see. It’s not just me and my brain anymore and that makes it all seem a little bit awkward and silly.
I appreciate that reading erotica is only made possible by someone else being involved. Someone else has to write the thing. (Of course, I occasionally write erotica myself but I only masturbate to it when it’s still in the conceptual stage. Wanking over one’s finished novella would be unforgivably vain.)
The thing is, reading is a funny old process and reading in one’s head, in my experience, is nothing like reading out loud. I don’t read at anything like the slow, tortoise-y speed I would do if I were reading something to someone else. Most of the time I am not conscious of reading the words at all. It’s more like the words and phrases and atmosphere and stuff are being dropped directly into my brain in much the same way that Arnold Schwarzenegger had those memories implanted in Total Recall.
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| Or did he? |
And if my reading matter is just turning up in my head, well then it’s fine when it’s stuffed to the gills with kinky sex and spanking because – let’s face it – my head’s chock-a-block with that sort of stuff anyway. But having someone else read it to me, well that’s when it gets embarrassing.
I listened to all three of the Westerfield books, (The Westerfield Affair, The Reddington Scandal and The Darlington Incident) in order. They all share the same narrator – Elliot Daniels, a deep voiced Thespian type prone to dramatic over-enunciation.
And, yeah, it was kind of embarrassing listening to some of it. I found myself blushing when talk turned to “wet swollen folds” and “moist pleats”. Because despite being unutterably filthy, I am also – it turns out – a bit of a prude.
You might not want to listen to these books during your daily commute. You know when there’s someone on the train who’s music is blaring out to the whole carriage? I often wonder if they realise or if maybe they have stuck the headphones in wrong and are completely oblivious that they’re making everyone else in the vicinity listen to Union J. (I don’t check with them of course because I would literally rather die than talk to a stranger on public transport).
I would worry that the accidental blaring out noise person would be me. Only instead of sharing my taste in music, I would accidentally be sharing my taste in spanking-based erotica to a carriage full of strangers. (Although, I suppose if the right person overheard it, that could turn out quite swimmingly. That’s a meet-cute waiting to be written right there.)
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| “Excuse me, I couldn’t help noticing that you seem to be really really enjoying that book.” |
Elliot Daniels does a decent job as the narrator although he does rather ham it up. The odd thing is, that I found Daniels’ narration style became less pronounced and overdone as I progressed through the trilogy. Odd because I am pretty sure that the audiobooks were recorded in the opposite order from which the original books were published, with the third in the series – The Darlington Incident – being recorded and released first as an audiobook.
So, Daniels clearly wasn’t told to tone down his performance. Rather he was encouraged to roll those ‘r’s and exaggerate the drama as much as possible. “Go on, stick a few more vowel sounds into ‘daaaahnced'” he was probably told. “Really go for it.”
Daniels also seems to have decided to base Lord Westerfield’s voice on Sam the Eagle from the Muppet Show. It’s a brave decision but not one I feel that he totally manages to pull off.
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| “Take me to your room. You have a very long, hard spanking coming.” |
The very best thing about listening to the audiobooks was that it gave me the opportunity to revisit the Westerfield stories again. They really are bloody brilliant, you know. By far and away the best spanking romance out there (and there’s some impressively stiff competition.) Even the Reddington Scandal which I always think of as the weakest of the three, was an absolute joy to listen to again.
I’m not sure if I’ll listen to any other Renee Rose books as audiobooks. I am probably not the best audiobook customer to be honest. I hate wearing headphones and I get distracted when the narrator tries to do different voices for each of characters. Plus, apparently, the embarrassment factor of having a man I don’t know saying “warm cock”. Although, to be honest, I got over that one by about halfway through the first book.
I wonder who the main erotica audiobook customers are? I bet it’s Grannies. Grannies love an audiobook, surely. Especially one of Renee’s. Sexy spankings, Regency intrigue and a narrator who sounds like he’s doing a Charles Dance impression ramped up to 300%. What more could one possibly want?
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| Oh god yes, that’s it. |