I want to discuss this literary medium oft referred to as "audio books." There is an individual wall for them in my city's tragic excuse for a library. Whole websites like Audible.com serve the every whim of endless novel recitations for those whom public transportation makes up 98% of their daily work commute or the avid road trip-takers who can cover breaths of road in a day.
If you are anything like my mother, you love a good audio book. She ensures she has a neat little stack of romance and comedy or the ill-fated, often microwave spliced experiment of those two genres. She would never consider leaving our town's mere adequate selection untouched when a road trip presents itself.
Conversely, if you have ever road-tripped with anyone like my dear mum, you most likely hate audio books. Maybe it is solely because the things she chose are not your first choices. Maybe auditory is not your preferred learning paradigm; it is most definitely not mine. Even more, perhaps it is the often static voices audio books are read in that make them truly dreadful 'trapped in a car for hours' listening.
Why am I asking you these questions? Wednesday brought about a sudden change of heart for me.
Let me explain my philosophy, first. I find myself a purist when it comes to my books: hardcover over all else, trade paper is usually what things are run in from the off now, and mass markets are strictly airport fauna. My father, forevermore known as Captain to you, decided that I should be privy to the first incarnation of Amazon's Kindle. A dreadful mistake on his part, however jovial his intentions had been. I despise it with a hatred toward something containing literature like you would not believe. It has no backlight, because that is frightful news for your retinas, and was always a sucker punch trying to turn the page. I kept flipping the Kindle itself, not pressing the 'next page' button. As comical as that may be, I refuse to believe that publishing will ever cease to exist in physical form. I will not allow it. The blessed thing about books? They do not run out of battery.
Audio books are about the only thing I dislike on near equal ground to my first generation Kindle. I do not like having a story read to me. Part of me screams at the narrator, "If you are not going to delineate characters by changing your voice, you should not bother at all." The majority of me simply gets frustrated and knows I can read the book faster reading it than hearing it.
Until Wednesday. You must understand a crucial shift. I positively love radio theatre, especially out of Great Britain. If you have not listened to the comedy radio show, "Cabin Pressure," there is actually little I can do for you than tell you go drop fifty dollars and wait with baited breath for the final episode to come out like the rest of us. If you have not heard the Radio Theatre's recordings of Oliver Twist and the Screwtape Letters, especially, Amazon has become your best friend.
Yet, this turn out is something different entirely. I began listening to an audio book on Wednesday night and have not stopped since. I am utterly enraptured. Completely caught up in the story, like every reader should be when they crack the spine, as cringe worthy a sound as it is. The narrator is exquisite, the prose eloquent, the narrative itself is a mystery thriller during the French Revolution. There is a sprinkle of romance. An impressively renown actor lends his vocal talent to the storyline and each character is an individual. He and she talk, act, and move different from each other. It is like having my own mind read the story out loud.
It is something we all do as readers. We develop this notion of what a character ought to sound, look, and act like within our mind's eye. It is what makes the translation between page and film so treacherous. It is the difference between listening to an audio book and believing you are listening to radio theatre and audio drama.
This is why we needed to have it out. I want to know where you fall on the audio book line. And if you love them infinitely more than I do, which is not a difficult task, then I would like you to share your favorite stories and the requisite narrators.
Wednesday began with my alma mater on every major news network, between here and the BBC, for a mass-stabbing and me, awaiting news from family friends, listening to ambulance sirens and helicopter blades beating the air in rapid succession. Wednesday ended with literature serving as a solace, as it does in all circumstances, when the ability to enter a new reality is at its most crucial.
It ended with me downloading the zip file, sent by a friend in an effort to lighten my heart, of Sally Gardner's "The Red Necklace" narrated by one Tom Hiddleston. And now, half way through disc four out of five, I can say that maybe, if all novels were read with the same vivre and pin ache, books on audio could find their place on my shelf or on my iPod. If the voice actors that bring them to life serve the dynamic, I will gladly hang my coat on the bandwagon of people that consume pages on the daily commute by having someone read to them the way a book should always be read.
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