Auditory
This newly acquired habit, listening to books on tape, happily continues with me. The discovery that I can listen to a reading and, for the most part, not get drowsy while I'm driving is sort of a great surprise gift – and my gratitude's renewed every time I get in the truck, these last few weeks. (I actually look forward now, in fact, to the otherwise rather unpleasant traffic-dense drives from where I live, in Catonsville, to the house where I've got a good deal of work going this year, just north of Annapolis, for the uninterrupted listening.)Today I returned Crime and Punishment, which was something I'd long wanted to read, and picked up The Tin Drum, which is something I may have known in the back of my mind that I had plenty of reason long to intend to read, but which in fact caught my attention as much as anything because of Herr Grass's recent unhappy appearances in headlines.
This recording of The Tin Drum is read, not coincidentally, by the same actor, George Guidall, whose Crime and Punishment still has a firm grip on my consciousness (or, in a way, conscience) – just finished yesterday. I kind of need to get out of the atmosphere of Dostoevsky (What – to Nazi-era Poland?!), but by the end of Crime & Punishment, I couldn't help looking for another of Guidall's titles. This stuff really comes to life in his voice.
posted by paul bowman @ 8:47 PM
3 Comments:
"Nazi-era Poland" - sounds like the great escape, alright!
We just discovered the joy of books on (in our case) CD during our recent road trip. We borrowed Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone from the library before we hit the road. I'd tried to read the book to the girls at bedtime. I consider myself a fairly gifted reader, but they always got bored and fell asleep before I could finish the first chapter. This time they were a captive audience, which certainly makes a difference. But the guy who read - aye carumba! Eight CDs in a row presented absolutely no obstacle for our little crew. Quite a revelation (Rowling's writing too, for that matter).
I haven't given a lot of thought to this — but really, there's a case to be made I guess for thinking of hearing a dramatic reading as, more than not, a separate & distinct kind of experience from reading for oneself. The sort of investment one makes as listener is perhaps not greater or less than, but in any case pretty different from, that that one makes as reader. And the reader's 'dramatizing' part — even though it's a tightly constrained form of acting and the awareness of text never recedes in the slightest for the audience — is actually pretty central, by no means secondary, to what one's involved in there as audience. To tell the truth, I'm occasionally aware of myself thinking 'This is something I'd like to read sometime', even as I'm listening to it read. And I don't suppose I should be surprised to find myself thinking in future, as I'm reading, that here's something I'd really like to hear read sometime — perhaps with a particular quality of reading.
Well, enough of that.
Your road-trip-w/-children account makes me think of the posts earlier this year in which smart single-mom friend Joyella tells of using a recording of The Fellowship of the Ring to help get herself & her three little ones (aged six & under) through 13-hour drives from Baltimore to Atlanta and back. (It seems that one of her readers, incidentally, rather over-confidently & expressively dismisses in comments there the usefulness of the audio book for his own getting through long drives.)
Darrell, have you written anywhere about your take on Rowling's stuff?
re: Rowling, I've only considered some of the noise in the critics' echo-chamber, here. I hadn't actually read (or listened to) her until last month. I could understand immediately why the books had sudden broad appeal, and I'll have to comment on that sometime in the next week or two. Her story construction is so carefully and tightly structured, it gives me pause (particularly as I edit my own stuff). More anon, I'm sure.
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