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jessica_k_t 's review for:
Dolly Parton, Songteller
by Dolly Parton
Dolly gets 5/5 but I’m rating this project a 4/5 because the audiobook and the print version are not the same.
I bought this in print when it came out in 2020, and it’s like a coffee table book—beautiful big photos with captions, printed song lyrics and overall just a really nice display piece that’s clearly been edited well and is easy to just kind of flip through like an encyclopedia of most of Dolly’s work. I haven’t read it cover to cover, and I don’t think it’s the kind of book most people would consume that way either.
This week, I was looking on Libby for a Dolly Parton memoir and saw this title was also a 5 hour audiobook. I was curious if it would follow the print book word for word or if she’d sing all the songs, so I listened to it.
The audiobook seems to be the original interviews that were condensed and illustrated for the print edition. This felt like listening to a podcast instead of the narrated book. There’s more repetition and it’s more conversational. I didn’t mind hearing Dolly tell her stories more organically instead of her reading them from the print edition, and the sung interludes in between stories were nice (these were not the full songs though).
Still, this recording feels like it should have been a visual mini-series for promoting the project instead of the “audiobook.” Listening to it, I felt like I was missing the photos of the print book, as well as her facial expressions as she talked about things, or even clips of home videos or performances, etc. She talks a lot about the songs that became mini films on Netflix, but this audiobook didn’t seem to be in partnership with Netflix.
There are details in the print version that weren’t in the audiobook and vice versa. The two iterations are totally different experiences.
I bought this in print when it came out in 2020, and it’s like a coffee table book—beautiful big photos with captions, printed song lyrics and overall just a really nice display piece that’s clearly been edited well and is easy to just kind of flip through like an encyclopedia of most of Dolly’s work. I haven’t read it cover to cover, and I don’t think it’s the kind of book most people would consume that way either.
This week, I was looking on Libby for a Dolly Parton memoir and saw this title was also a 5 hour audiobook. I was curious if it would follow the print book word for word or if she’d sing all the songs, so I listened to it.
The audiobook seems to be the original interviews that were condensed and illustrated for the print edition. This felt like listening to a podcast instead of the narrated book. There’s more repetition and it’s more conversational. I didn’t mind hearing Dolly tell her stories more organically instead of her reading them from the print edition, and the sung interludes in between stories were nice (these were not the full songs though).
Still, this recording feels like it should have been a visual mini-series for promoting the project instead of the “audiobook.” Listening to it, I felt like I was missing the photos of the print book, as well as her facial expressions as she talked about things, or even clips of home videos or performances, etc. She talks a lot about the songs that became mini films on Netflix, but this audiobook didn’t seem to be in partnership with Netflix.
There are details in the print version that weren’t in the audiobook and vice versa. The two iterations are totally different experiences.