Since my eyes got bad a little over a year ago, I’ve had to listen to books rather than read. (It’s frustrating.) Having listened to a couple of hundred audiobooks over that span, I have a pretty decent idea of what constitutes good narration.

As an aside, something around six months ago, I got an email from Google Play, inviting me to be one of their beta testers for AI (Artificial Intelligence) book narration. I’d just paid about $3,500 (!) to convert Reinventing Herself into an audiobook and...