What Do Audible Narrators Sound Like?

Note: This was originally published as an Observable notebook.

Recently while looking for audiobooks I came across Eragon, a children's book about a telepathic dragon.

I scrolled down to read the reviews and found these gems:

They made me wonder — if a single book can bring out so much emotion and creativity in people, what would we find if we went looking for more reviews like this?

So I decided to plumb the depths of bad narration, collecting the top reviews for 40,000 Audible audiobooks and searching through them for phrases similar to “sounds like” to get a sense of what people find remarkable.

It turns out that narrators often sound:

Below you can search through reviews that talk about narration. Click any review to jump to its book on Audible, where you can listen to a sample.`

P. S. If anybody is wondering what a telepathic dragon cookie monster does sound like, she sounds like this:

And that's it!

Thanks to Zora Killpack, Ben Cartwright-Cox, Yuriy Rusko, and Anthony Vastano for advice and feedback.

Bonus Quotes

Here's a collection of a few more reviews that I found amusing.