audiobooked

My first attempt at being an audiobook kind of person, that did not pan out. I was listening on and off to Jane Eyre, which did not particularly grab me, and it was read by a woman with some kind of palsy and an unhealthy fondness for overarticulation, and I found myself zoning out constantly as I listened to it on my little Otis player, which had crappy sound that faded in and out and soon broke and then I canceled my subscription and gave up on audiobooks.

Cut to many years later (maybe two) when I started Exercising, and decided, for no good reason at all, that to keep me motivated and distracted what I really needed when I exercised was to listen to audiobooks, and iPods were the best thing for audiobooks so what I clearly needed to do immediately was to buy an iPod, and glory day, I should subscribe to audible because you get a hundred bucks off the price of an iPod!

Please note the keen and incisive logic.

I got that subscription, my iPod arrived an achingly long time afterwards, and the first book I picked I decided would be chicklit trash. That was clearly the only thing I had the attention span for (see above, re: my zoning out) and trash is awesome for working out.

It was The Devil Wears Prada. It was wretched and bad and I hated the book. But man, I loved listening to it. I loved the narrator right inside my head and the way she did all the characters with varying degrees of skill and the expressiveness of lines being read with their appropriate inflections and I found that this crappy book was living for me. Living! I heard the voice of the narrator in my head every time I thought about the thing, and the characters were little people also in my head with lives of their own and it was disconcerting and creepy.

And also kind of awful, because you have to understand, this is a really, really bad book.

I'd been totally captivated by books I've read before, but not to this kind of independent extent, if that makes any sense.

It's happening again with The Stupid Nanny Diaries (which is possibly not its real name). It's way, way better-written and much less annoying than Fucking Prada, but it is still mediocre chicklit, and it is again inside my head, these voices. In my head. It is weird. Weird. Also, the reader keeps saying "rum." Which is totally the wrong way to pronounce "room."

My next audiobook is somewhat more respectable – All is Vanity, by the woman who wrote Drowning Ruth, about writing. I am a dork, and worried I won't be able to follow something sort of intellectual on audio. I am a dork who is overthinking these things.