On Audiobooks…
Let’s talk about audio books
I have become reacquainted with my local library.
I would say I am library friendly, but not a library nerd. I wasn’t one of those kids that lived in the library growing up. I guess the relationship was more akin to my relationship with the local post office – a municipal service to be used as needed.
My local library has changed form a couple times in my lifetime, evolving like a chrysalis into ever more interesting manifestations.
I remember the original in a historic building. Then they moved into a larger space in the old high school building. And now, just recently they have constructed a modern, spacious building to house the library’s wares and programs.
I suppose my most interesting library memory was randomly pulling a book from the shelf and reading a few pages. It was an old, musty hardback. The short section I read was an account of Roman soldiers taking a meal in an inn or something. I put it back in the stack. But the memory stuck. I wish I knew what that book was. I would read it.
Flash forward to current time.
Our hero wanders into the new library building looking for succor in his novel-writing Odyssey. I haven. A port in the tempest.
And what do I find? Some very nice people. They give me a room to work in. They don’t bother me. They give me a card and tell me how to use it.
I can rent DVD to watch, like old people do, and get access to those shows that were held behind the great streaming paywalls that stretch across modern virtual landscapes and hold at bay those not willing to subscribe.
I can read magazines, remember magazines? And newspapers, remember newspapers? On my Kindle!
And I have access to many, many audiobooks.
The thing you know about me is that I love books. I love the heft, the smell and the feel of a book. My office is cluttered with teetering piles of used paperbacks.
I will read books on my Kindle. The experience, while not the same, is similar.
I have my genres. I like Science Fiction and Literary works and History. I will read business books for their content. I’m not a fan of Fantasy or Romance or Spy thrillers.
No one ever dies having read all the books, but I make a good dent. I usually have 2-3 going at a time and, depending on their girth, complete a written book every couple weeks.
I have never been a big consumer of audio books. I listen to Podcasts.
But, now, our hero, teetering on the edge of opportunity has access to all these audio books on his phone just like podcasts.
Whoa! Long bike rides. Long training runs. Car rides. Saturdays and Sundays working on my to do lists. I can listen to a lot of audio.
I am coming up on the 2-week mark of this experience and am listening to my 5th audiobook.
An audio book is not like reading a bound, physical book. It’s not like words on a page that need to pass through your inner artistic rendering machine to make the story dance in your brain as you construct it.
Audio book take that internal-creation of narrator, characters and their voices out of play. The audio performer decides how to accent and color the words. Audio books are one distilled version of the book. One interpretation.
So what have I listened to? Let’s have some short book reviews!
I started on a long road trip with a long book by Hiroki Murakami called “Kafka on the Shore”. This is an odd book. I’m not even sure I know what it was about. But it was beautifully written and moving. It was finely constructed. It was fantastical, but not a fantasy. I hear echoes of all the masers of literature in Murakami which makes me happy.
My previous experience with Murakami was his wonderful book “What I think about when I think about running.” And a short story in the New Yorker. But now I realize I’m going to need to go deeper into his particular codex because he is a modern day master of the art.
The second book I listened to was The Library Book by Susan Orleans. This I a paean to Libraries and the library subculture wrapped around the story of the devastating 1986 fire that mostly destroyed the Los Angeles City Library. I like it. I am not of the Library culture but it made me happy that libraries exist and suggested to me that I should get more involved in supporting them.
The third book I listened to was “Small things like these by Claire Keegan”. This is a historical fiction based in 1980’s Ireland. It’s surprisingly short as an audiobook at just over 2 hours. The Irishman who reads it does a great job and it is a powerful story and a commentary on how we live our lives. It won a fair hoard of literary prize and is well worth a 2 hour investment.
And the fourth book I listened to was “The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.” On the surface this is a narrative history of the Wright Brothers and fills in the details around the mythos of the two bicycle mechanic brothers from Dayton Ohio who made the first powered flight and invented much of what we now take for granted in aviation. But, it’s also a propaganda piece, in love with the idea of a young, vibrant America, humble and competent in the world, creating mechanical miracles from whole cloth through hard work, clean living and stick-to-it-iveness.
Currently I am listening to “Lincoln in the Bardo b y George Saunders.” Which is a nice companion piece to his book on writing “A Swin in a Pond in the Rain,” which I am reading in traditional dead tree form with the writing group I joined at the, wait for it, local library.
And since we’re all friends here, I’ll leave you with this story.
One of the reasons I visited the local library was to see if there were any local writing groups I could join. I was feeling quite claustrophobic in my crowded home office and deigned that some external association might be the grease for the gears I needed.
I saw on the library calendar that there was a Monday morning writing group that met from 6:00 AM to 9:00. I confirmed with the front desk that, indeed there was such a group, because with writers there is a high level of commitment but a low level of execution and if I was going to get up early on a Monday morning I wanted to make sure that there were bodies in attendance.
I showed up and was warmly welcomed. AS one would expect it is an eclectic group that would warrant a short story of its own!
One of the activities that they were doing was reading the aforementioned Saunders Book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, as a learning exercise. In this book Saunders walks through the mechanics of writing great short stories by analyzing seven short stories by Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev.
On my first day with the group the leader turned to me apologetically and said something along the lines of “You may not get much out of this because you haven’t read the book or the short stories…”
And in my head I’m smiling because I’ve been training my whole life for this conversation. You want to talk about Tolstoy? Chekov? Gogol? I’m in! And that book by Saunders? It’s sitting on the floor of my office.
Let’s go!
So – they may get sick of me and throw me out.
This week we’re talking about Hemmingway!
In conclusion, my friends, audiobooks are another wonderful way to consume content, commercial free, on your headphones, especially if you are confronted by arduous time alone in the woods in pursuit of immortality.
It would be so much easier to pursue immorality, but that probably comes with its own baggage.
Don’t be a friad to wander into your local library and give them some love.