Stop doing accents, you're embarrassing yourself!
These audiobooks do accents so badly they'll give you second-hand embarrassment. Please let me know what books I should add to this list.
created by displacedcactus
last updated August, 2026
Comments
This is a hilarious list.
Pucking Strong by Emily Rath features the worst Swedish accent I have ever heard.
Added! Bad Swedish accents are so cringe.
Omg i totally agree it is so fucking bad 😂 fun book imo, so the bad accent was really a shame
haven’t listened myself but i’ve heard that ilya’s russian accent is atrocious in the heated rivalry audiobook
I've heard that too! Gonna add it!
Also Game Changer, the first book in that series, I had to actually go buy the paperback the same day cos the attempt at a Brooklyn accept was so bizarre
Oh no!
I want to say, I’m super loving my current Robin Hobb trilogy (starting with Fool’s Errand) but the audiobook narrator is rough. All his female characters are awful and I think maybe he can only do a a French and Scottish accent so those are what he defaults to constantly even when it makes not sense at all. Also he’s constantly mispronouncing simple words. Like crochet (cro-shay) is not pronounced crochit 😮💨
Crochit? shudder Added!
I did a full body shudder.
Dear audiobook narrators it’s okay to look up a word when you aren’t sure how to say it. It just takes a minute I swear.
Sometimes I'm like "Is it me? Have I been saying it wrong this whole time?" but I would be very confident I was right about that!
If Heated Rivalry is on here, Game Changer should be too because Kip's accent is ten times worse 😂 but up to you of course 🫡
It got two nominations, it's added!
You know what, I’m going to bite the bullet and say it. We’re all thinking it. The Australian accent situation in Three Holidays and a Wedding was not ideal
Australian accents are so cartoony when they're bad!
I started listening to the audiobook for River of Teeth (American Hippo 1) and immediately stopped. Not great southern accent.
Oh no! I really enjoyed reading that one with my eyes but it sounds like a bad audio experience.
Tbh I'm not the best person to tell whether or not an accent it accurate but I do know that I turned around and checked out the eBook.
Sometimes an accent is so bad that even though you don't know quite what it should sound like, you know that ain't it.
Omg incredible concept. Literally yesterday my partner and I had friends over, and one of them treated us to the experience of Kip's accent in Game Changer. Cue bafflement and horror all around.
The narrator for The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner does a heinous French accent that starts out like a bad Indian accent, becomes a bad Russian accent, then finally settles into something French-like but also still kind of Russian and Indian. She also pronounced chemise like "sheh-mize" and psychic as "physic." That last one almost made me ragequit but it was in the afterword. The book overall I thought was astonishingly bad even aside from the narrator, but she really elevated the experience /derogatory.
