Read vs Listen: Daisy Jones & The Six

A book set as interview transcript, performed by twenty-one people, one per character.

Confidence 91%, which puts it in the clear band. Bands run from close call at 50 to 64, through leaning at 65 to 79 and clear at 80 to 94, up to clear cut at 95 and above.

What this book actually is

Not a novel with chapters. Every unit of text is a speaker's name on its own line, followed by their testimony, with white space between turns. There is no narrative connective tissue at all: no 'she said', no scene setting, no description that is not somebody's memory. The reader assembles what happened out of the collision of accounts, and the accounts disagree.

It runs in order. Titled, dated sections carry the band from 1965 through to the night in July 1979 when they split, and then a short section set in the present. The framing is that everyone involved was interviewed decades later, and the identity of the person who compiled the interviews is withheld until the end.

The case for reading it

It comes down to the furniture on the page. In print the speaker's name sits above every single block, so you can scan back up when a minor voice returns and you cannot place them. First appearances carry an italic role gloss, so you know a name belongs to a biographer rather than a bandmate. The section headings show which date range you are in. And the lyrics of the album the whole book is building towards are printed; on audio they arrive as a downloadable file you open outside the player. If you want the book as a designed object, that is a real argument.

The case for listening to it

Twenty-one performers, one per character. The confirmed assignments put Jennifer Beals in as Daisy, Pablo Schreiber as Billy, Benjamin Bratt as Graham, Judy Greer as Karen, Fred Berman as Eddie and Henry Leyva as Rod. Each keeps the same voice from beginning to end, which means the recording does the job the printed name does and does it without you having to look. Beyond identification, the book's whole method is people contradicting each other about the same evening, and contradiction is a matter of tone. A cast supplies the hesitation, the defensiveness and the timing that print can only mark with a full stop.

The audiobook in detail

Random House Audio released it on 5 March 2019, the same day as the hardcover, running 9 hours 3 minutes on Audible, about six hours at one and a half times speed. Penguin Random House states 9 hours 4 minutes, which is where the conflicting figures online come from. The credited cast is twenty-one strong and includes Ari Fliakos, January LaVoy, Julia Whelan, Robert Petkoff and Oliver Wyman alongside the named leads. It was a 2020 Audie Award finalist for Multi-Voiced Performance. One master recording is distributed under regional imprints, so a UK listener buying from Penguin Audio is buying the same production.

Who should ignore this verdict

Anyone who wants the lyrics, which are printed in the book and relegated to a separate file on audio. Anyone who came from the Prime Video series expecting the same performers, because the television cast and the audiobook cast are entirely different people. And anyone who reads with a pen, since a book made of quotable testimony is a book people annotate.

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