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Combining the comments about never getting through LoTR and preferring Steppenwolf as an audio book - it took us three years but how my husband and I got through LoTR was reading it to each other while driving, mostly on long trips which we make two or three times a year. I find the audiobook thing (or having it read to me by my hubby) is good for tough reads (we read "The Prince" by Machiavelli this way too, as well as a couple tough histoical books I'd never have read myself) because even though I myself have trouble processing certain things when read to me* the spoken word is slower than when you read it yourself so your brain takes the time to process it properly instead of passing over anything requiring a pause to think... and "live" audiobooks are easier to rewind... ;D "Hey, can you please start the last paragraph over? I had to concentrate on driving for a sec there and missed what it said..."

* - mostly numbers and mathmatical concepts, just don't bother trying, in one ear and out the other, I need to write them (take notes) or see them written down as a whole, or else not enough of it sticks in my head by the time the narration is finished for me to make sense of it... starting to realize why the engineering degree was so tough :P
 
Yeah, I can't do audio books. They're simply to slow for me. I simply have no appreciation for detailed descriptions.

"He was a dark and husky man. Large, round, with skin the color of ebony...." "Right, fat black man, can we move on now?" ;)

However, for those who do like audio books, I recommend audible.com. My sister really likes it. $15 a month membership, which also gets you 1 credit per month. Most books were 1 credit.
- Brett

Sent from my DROID2 GLOBAL using Tapatalk
 
MrMooCow said:
"He was a dark and husky man. Large, round, with skin the color of ebony...." "Right, fat black man, can we move on now?" ;)
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LOL, I didn't find Tolkien THAT verbose, but friends of mine joke that Robert Jordan was in fact that bad... oh, and I have to be doing something (driving, chain mail, crocheting, beadwork) while listening or else I fall asleep surprisingly with alarming speed, something I somehow picked up in university...
 
Tolkien is excellent, but for today's readers he's tough. Back then there was no TV, language itself was entertainment, you didn't just want a piece of information, you wanted it delivered artfully. It's just a different mind reading the things now than back then, not one right one wrong, just different. If I hadn't read LoTR when I was 8 I might never have gotten into that kind of writing honestly.

Also Tolkien is very dense, people think he over-describes everything, but the reality is that he has less filler than modern writers. If any modern writer wrote LoTR again, just paraphrased it into modern style, it would end up triple the length. He sometimes crammed chapters onto single pages.

Being so dense can make it hard to read though, as it cannot be skip-read effectively. You miss a sentence you miss a LOT, so you have to slow down and get it all, which can make it seem ponderous.


Also - I also cannot handle audio books, it's just so slow. I read far faster than I talk, so an audiobook would be seriously hard for me to follow!
 
AToE said:
Also - I also cannot handle audio books, it's just so slow. I read far faster than I talk, so an audiobook would be seriously hard for me to follow!
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It's the only way I can go at the moment. We have a nearly 6 month old baby son here, so not getting a lot of reading done these days. But, I work coloring/painting comics all day on the computer, so it's pretty easy to listen to a lot of books. And I've been doing my job for 20 years now, so I go pretty auto pilot most of the time, so I can really pay attention to the book.

Some books are really good as audio books, like A Clockwork Orange. The reader on that is just awesome. I've encountered one book that I think couldn't possibly be as good in written form, called The Adventure of English. It's a pretty decently thorough history of the English language. But, throughout the book, the reader gives examples of all of the dialects, Old English, American slave English, just tons of them. And he's simply amazing.

Anyway, I listen to music, podcasts and audio books. Makes meeting a deadline easier some days. A *good* audio book can make it easier for me to keep my butt in the chair and keep working.
 
About fifteen years ago, I really enjoyed my boyfriend at the time's copy of the audiobook for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't know who the narrator was but he was great. Unfortunately, also how I discovered that they put me to sleep unless I'm also doing something with my hands. :p
 
Chevette Girl said:
About fifteen years ago, I really enjoyed my boyfriend at the time's copy of the audiobook for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't know who the narrator was but he was great. Unfortunately, also how I discovered that they put me to sleep unless I'm also doing something with my hands. :p
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Yeah, don't think I could just sit there and listen to one. It'd knock me out for sure. Besides, if I can just sit there, I'd rather do the reading myself.
 
MattHollingsworth said:
Yeah, don't think I could just sit there and listen to one. It'd knock me out for sure. Besides, if I can just sit there, I'd rather do the reading myself.
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I think it's that we wanted to listen to it together rather than both try to read from the same book (which is generally annoying no matter how much you love someone)... but otherwise, yeah, I'd just read it, and if reading makes me pass out it was either really boring or I need the sleep anyway :)

Sitting on a pile of Ken Follett, contemplating where to start...
 
Chevette Girl said:


Sitting on a pile of Ken Follett, contemplating where to start...
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I have The Pillars of the Earth from Follett on my list for audio books, but reviews said the reader isn't so great, so I've hesitated. We'll see. Read anything else by him? Any recommendations?

I just finished the 2 volumes of Battle Cry of Freedom, 38 hours or so of American Civil War history, which was great. About halfway through The Hunger Games, which is pretty fun. Easy but fun. Might do A Short History of Australia next, but not sure. We'll see. Non fiction history stuff is actually easier for me to listen to. If the reader is engaged, it's good. If not, it ends up too dry and sucks the life out of it.

I don't think I'd want to listen to any Cormac McCarthy though. I love reading his use of language and just want to actually read that stuff.
 
MattHollingsworth said:
I have The Pillars of the Earth from Follett on my list for audio books, but reviews said the reader isn't so great, so I've hesitated. We'll see. Read anything else by him? Any recommendations?
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I've read Pillars of the Earth before and I don't know how it'd go as an audio book, it's a really long read and would take for fricking ever being read out loud... that's the only one by him I've read before. Top of the pile is Triple, Code to Zero in there somewhere... but while rooting through the "to read" bag I found one by Jack Whyte, Knights of the Black and White, I think that'll be first :) Ooh, something by Spider Robinson, Telempath, maybe that one first.

Currently reading "Touch Wood, Confessions of an Accidental Porn Director".
 
Audiobooks are too slow for me too, plus, with a book, if I get to a part in the story that I don't like, I can skip over it easily if I only have to turn a few pages. With that said, I do like reading in bed with the kindle app on my iPhone. I've got a bunch of free classics that I've read many times, keeps me off the streets. :)
 
Chevette Girl said:
About fifteen years ago, I really enjoyed my boyfriend at the time's copy of the audiobook for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...:p
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OOhh! I read that on audio, too! Loved it.

What about Dean Koontz?! Loved Life Expectancy...a laugh-out-loud thriller. Also love some of the Odd Thomas books.
 
Finished reading
Hermann Hesse's
Steppenayahuscawolf

It made me ponder this:
Was Hesse a contemporary of Carl Jung?
Indeed he was.
Was he an analysand of Jung?
Don't know.
He was clearly "already opposed to the next war" as Jung was, although he did not see the continent bathed in blood so graphically as Jung did. And he did use the word "individuation" at least once in the text...
Welcome to the Shadowlands...

One treasure of the audiobook:
The text concludes with Mozart. And the audiobook concludes with Mozart in a way that I would not have been able to conjure it in my imagination if I had been reading with my eyes...
 
I've done the audio book thing too. Most recently was Fahrenheit 451. I'll usually listen to them while working out in the shop as long as I'm not doing a lot of grinding. But I've recently picked up a new book, and if you like blood and people with sharp objects, you might like this one... It's Phlebotomy Essentials. I start my Phlebotomy class on the 13th, so I figured I should get a jump on it rather than getting into another book and not do the class work cause I'm to busy reading. :D
 
Ooh, something by Spider Robinson
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I Love Spider Robinson. I have read and reread the Calahan's series for years! He's one of my top ten authors of all times!

At the moment I'm reading "A Song of Fire and Ice" series by George R.R. Martin peppered in with all my magazine reading (Mother Earth News and my culinary mags)
 
I'm reading "The Once and Future King," by T.H. White and re-reading "House of Leaves" by Mark Danilewski. I keep meaning to get back to Songs of Ice and Fire, but never seem to actually do it.
 
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