Audio Books, Turning Point

I have been posting on this blog for more than 10 years. On and off, with more enthusiasm or less, but somehow Blogspot has not shut this thing down (unlike all my photography accounts on .be's). I was talking to Ana the other day, who recently started a blog herself, and apparently I have been missing out on something. Or as she put it, "I should write a blog." Indeed, with the life I lead and the things I witness it is criminal not to share some of my experiences with those who want to listen. 

So here we go. 

I will start with something that has changed my life in the past few years and that I spent most of the day yesterday doing: listening to books. So, audiobooks are not everybody's favorite thing. Julia, a friend from Oxford who is studying Literature, falls asleep as soon as she presses play (well, Julia is a healthy person who has no problems sleeping, unlike some of us). I, on the other hand, cannot sleep until I press stop. So why audiobooks?

1. Saves time. Listening to audiobooks is much faster than actually reading them, at least for me. I am a very slow reader, but even my brother, who reads at the speed of light, can only read the book a few hours faster than the actor. But the main point is that, unlike a normal book, I can listen to audiobooks while I am doing pretty much anything else: cleaning, exercising, cooking, walking, travelling, etc. And THAT feels good, and safe, and it doesn't feel like I am wasting time.
2. It is easy. Lets get real. I am a student. I spend so much time with my head stuck in books that when I go home the last thing I want to do is to open another one. In fact, my eyes get so tired sometimes that I have to wear my sunglasses inside.
3. It sooths those of us who grew up listening to parents reading to us before going to sleep. It is calming. Naturally, audiobooks sometimes are the opposite of calming (soooo many intense scenes...), but most times it feels good to be read to. 
4. Free. Free. Free. So many places. Free. Youtube has pretty much everything. If not, Audible.com lets you have two audiobooks for free when you sign up.
   
5. They can, and often do, add dynamic; or in linguistic terms, alliteration screams out. I have discovered that reading a book out loud brings a completely different universe to the story. This is hard to explain, but suddenly the sentences gain an incredible swing, and the sounds of each syllable become much more evident. The unintended rhymes, or the swing of a pragraph, there is inertia, and every word is as heavy and as tasty as honey. Of course to achieve this the book has to be good, and the narrator a genius. But they are out there people! Roy Dotrice and George R.R. Martin, for example. Listen to this, and then we can all die happy:

 

So far, I have pretty much  stuck with the very "teenagery" books because I wanted to re-read some of my favorite growing-up-stories (especially those set in Oxford and England). Harry Potter (go with Stephen Fry for all saints' sake... Jim Dale is a terrible Voldemort), His Dark Materias (amazing, they have a full cast at Listening Library, and OH MY ARE THEY AMAZING!!! And it is all on Youtube); Lord of the Rings (I must admit that listening to the audio books actually got me through the books, which I had not done before); The Night Circus (with Jim Dale, but oh well...); and then Game of Thrones, which are not from my teenage years, but are basically what got me into audiobooks in the first place. That, and a few short stories, like this one read by Mike Bennett (another genius):