I don't claim to have extensive experience with audio books. I've listened to a handful of them over the years. Then, about a year ago, Spotify announced that audio books would be included in the base price (15 hours per month, for the primary account holder only). I looked over their catalog, saw a book by David Baldacci that looked interesting, and started listening. That turned into listening to the 3 books in the 6:20 man series and the 7 books in the Memory Man series.

Those books were all similar in that they were read mostly by a male, but a female did come in and read the female characters. My main complaint was that the female didn't have a lot of "characters". By that, I mean that what I assume is her standard voice was used for the main female character, and she would alter that voice somewhat for other female characters. But, her "other female voice" was always some version of a deep southern accent. That worked well for one of the books that took place largely in Texas and Alabama. But the majority of those books took place in the upper Midwest or Northeast. It was kind of disconcerting to hear a very southern voice explain how the character was born and raised in Pittsburgh, but moved to Ohio as a young adult and had been there ever since.

That aside, it was generally easy to follow the audio books and figure out who was speaking based on the male and female voices, and the variations each used for different characters. I assumed that was pretty much industry standard - to have males read males and females read females... at least for publications of well-known authors.

After all those Baldacci books, I decided to go for a change of pace and picked out a John Grisham novel. It was read by a farily well-known actress... Mary-Louise Parker. Those who are familiar with her know she has a style of being kind of sarcastic, and speaks somewhat lazily. She read nearly every character with her standard speaking/acting voice. The main two characters were both female. The main villain was a male. They all had the same voice. Her only real different voice was for older characters, when she added a bit of gravel to her voice. to make them sound old I guess. I frequently found myself having to re-listen to some exchanges to figure out who was saying what.

The book I'm listening to now is also a widely published author (Sandra Brown). This book is read by a male, and he does all the characters including females. He does a good job differentiating the male characters - I can tell who is talking based on the voice. But, he only has one "female" voice that is used for all female characters. That isn't really an issue because there is only one principal female character and the others are minor. And his female voice is passable... you wouldn't mistake it for an actual female, but it's good enough coming from a man who has a deep natural speaking voice. The three main male characters are a black man, a white "cowboy", and a Hispanic man. He does a great job with each of those dialects, so it's easy to know who is speaking based on the voice that is used.

No real point to all this, other than to say I was surprised that is apparently isn't the norm to have males do males and females do females, and that there wasn't at least more effort to use different voices for characters that matched their background.