Audiobooks. Resurrected Post.
I may have mentioned that I have a substantial commute to work. Others might not consider forty minutes each way substantial, but I do. The point is that I spend a great deal of time each week in the car. Some might spend this time listening to the radio: music or new or talk. I listen to books.
I used to check out books on tape or CD at the library. My new ride came without a CD player, something I did not notice until I got it home. I mean, why wouldn���t a car have a CD player? Apparently I am old and thus did not realize music is now delivered via mp3, or streamed, or through some other magical conveyance. Anyway, I had to adapt. So now I download library audiobooks to my mobile phone which then play then via Bluetooth over the car���s media system. It works, but the options remain limited.
Anyway, I go through a lot of books. Often I end up sitting in the car a minute or two after I arrive at my destination in order to finish up a particularly engrossing section.
I love the immersive nature of the medium. Especially if the narrator possesses a pleasant, versatile voice and an engaging delivery. Not all of them do. Some ��� generally celebrities, apparently hired for name recognition rather than vocal skills ��� perform reasonably well, delivering the emotion and intonations in a skillful fashion but fail to pronounce certain words properly. That never fails to eject me from the story. The narrator continues on, of course, but I���m still back at the point where he screwed up the pronunciation of ���mischievous��� or what have you. It might be thirty seconds or so before I am drawn back into the story, wondering what I���ve missed in the meantime. (One of the technical issues with newer audiobook media is the difficulty involved in or impossibility of rewinding. That was never a problem with tapes.)
But the sheer fact that I feel as if I���ve been physically removed from another world speaks to the immersive nature of audio books. Right now I���m revisiting some of Patrick O���Brian���s Aubrey and Maturin novels. I���m not a sailor. I have no notion of what he is describing half the time when he writes of catheads and futtocks. But I don���t care. I don���t need to imagine the specifics, I���m too engrossed in the sensation, the spell woven by the words he employs to depict nautical doings, creating a poetic shell enclosing the reader that evokes the feeling of the events more convincingly than he could by mechanistically conveying the information in a didactic manner. While he was a skilled enough writer that I���m sure he could explain to me how and why to rig a preventer backstay, I���m happier simply existing in the bubble universe he creates through his terminological poetry ��� as read by a gifted narrator, that other, essential component.
So, three cheers for audiobooks.
View more on Ken Lizzi’s website ��Like ������� 0 comments ������� flag
Published on December 16, 2018 13:40
