The Poet? Hardly.

I just returned from a wedding in Arizona. I was traveling with my mom. On the way back we stopped at a truck stop in New Mexico that smelled unusually horrible (it was one we'd been to multiple times and had come to trust, so, it was probably just having a bad, puke-filled day) bought an audiobook of a Michael Connelly novel The Poet.

Holy Fuck it was horrible.

I mean the book may have been unobjectionable enough, but I don't know how in a million years the producers of the audiobook figured the right thing to do was to have their white male narrator do impersonations of women and minorities even when the text did not specify a particular park ranger named Peña, for instance, should have an accent. Thank god there was only one black guy in the novel (since black people have the same last names as white people, the author is obliged to find a way to point out that they are black) otherwise imagine the vocal contortions that would have been required to distinguish them from one another AND from all the white people! But I guess shallow distinctions like that become quite important when you're dealing with a bevy of two-dimensional characters.

"The F-bombs come in clusters!" I said to my Mom. Does that happen in real life? One guy says 'fuck' and suddenly everybody's saying it. Then for a while we forget about the word. just so we can be sure the book is true-to-life. Plus, arguments between characters are really awkward when it's just one guy yelling at himself in different voices.

"Fuck you!"
"No, f–"
"Fuck you!!!" he interrupted (himself). (Awkward)

The bad guys, both sexual perverts and therefore, like women, weak and otherish, sounded like girls, as the only thing he could do to distinguish the female characters from the men was to sort of speak higher and softer and use rising inflections, and sound bitchy for no reason... Whereas, in reality, women often just sort of make statements, I find. Then again, I'm not a professional actor or whatever the fuck that guy thought he was. Also, to indicate that the main love interest was a nice woman, he made her sound all out-of-breath and earnest. But she was an FBI agent! and therefore should talk like Rizzoli and/or Isles which is a show I would follow with interest if I still had cable, not because I'm certain as yet that it's good and/or non-stereotypey... but because I'm trying to be more aware of the Bechdel Rule and Rizzoli and Isles probably will talk about a lot of things, and will have much success beating up old guys with baseball bats if the episode I saw in Amarillo is any indication. Plus Isles, in spite of being one of those wonderful smokin' hot nerds with maybe a touch of asperger's (or is she just really honest and really knowledgeable about diseases?) that we see so much of on television today, has an interesting theory about how mini skirts were liberating. 'Cause women need to be able to move like cheetahs, presumably.