Not every book works well as an audio. If it’s adequate, it may not be a successful work-commute diversion. For most of eight years, I’ve had a long-enough drive (20 minutes one way) where audio books are more satisfying than, public radio. Spoken word holds the attention better than even the best tunes, work week after work week.
Radio news used to be my obsession, but yet another report from the Near East that sounds exactly like yesterday’s puts me into an angry sleep, and you shouldn’t nod off on the freeway. Besides, though a devout NPR fan since 1977, All Things Considered in recent years has become galling, though Morning Edition, when I’m up early enough to hear it, remains fascinating. The latter seems to have more variety and is perkier, while the former stays somber, where even its wittier commentators tend toward world-weariness.
But check out a well-plotted book-on-CD, even non-fiction, and a competent narrator, and I may sit in the car a minute longer at either end of the commute to end a chapter or a track.
Narrators are the tricky part. I have returned CD sets of acclaimed books after just half of the first disc because the speaker is horrible. A good one can’t really act out all the characters because it’s a novel not a play and most of the sentences are interior. The competent reader hints at accents and inflections. You want Sissy Spacek, not Dame Edna.
Generally, American men are the best. The British with three exceptions tend to overdramatize and are terrible at women’s voices. The exceptions are actor Jeremy Irons doing Lolita, perhaps my favorite recorded book ever, and John le Carre reading his own novels. Most writers are terrible at their own reading; le Carre though reminds me of Alec Guinness, who played his George Smiley, and Stephen King and Thomas Harris (the Hannibal books), are very effective, especially the latter. Oh, and the English actor Jim Dale is every character in every Harry Potter book.
Women dramatizing male characters rarely work as well as the other way ’round, to my ear. I just completed, however, a terrific exception (and doubtless given Google and an hour I’d recall others). Suzanne Toren had a marathon in Team of Rivals, which on paper is more than 900 pages. With very few women in it. That translates into 36 70-minute compact discs, the most I’ve ever attempted, and I finished it in only six years. Pretty good, considering it came out in 2006.
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is both the only Civil War history and only Lincoln biography I’ve read this side of college. Histories generally try my patience, and biographies of politicians? Come on.
But old Abe: Don’t you have to wonder how he did it? This book explains a lot because it’s more than a biography and less than a history. The former is because it’s the biography of his Cabinet, though mostly about the tall dude. The latter is because the Civil War and its precursors are too complicated even for 900-plus pages.
In the promising sunlight of early March, I needed a change in the deck of my ’95 Geo Prizm. Goodwin had drama, good writing, suspense, psychology, thrills. What could be different? I get all my audio books from the Fayetteville Public Library, usually relying on chance, what will be on the shelves that moment I walk in?
How about Stephen King’s next-to-newest novel, Cell? Some sort of beam hits every cell phone on the planet and turns all their owners into suicidal or homicidal zombies. Except for those who don’t own wireless communications, like our comic book creator hero and the two he meets up with, a teen-age girl and a gay guy whose cat knocked his cell off a table and broke it hours earlier.
King has Campbell Scott for this reading. In movies he’s a soft-spoken actor, but here Scott can portray everyone from the hysterical then resourceful 15-year-old to the diverse accents of high and low Boston and also Maine, the home naturally of our artist hero. Scott’s a narrator to watch for.
This is my fourth or fifth King book. The serendipity of finding it after Lincoln is perfect. What a contrast, yet both have clues on how better writers do it. Goodwin kept me engrossed, even though everyone knows the end. How does a writer move characters through jeopardy without numbing the reader? Goodwin summarizes four years of battles. How does King move our three Musketeers on foot from downtown Boston to a suburb? Ever tried to write that? Normal writers would fall asleep on their keyboards, never mind the reader: Here’s what happened in the first block, the second streetlight, the bridge, the second mile, snore.
I would like to know pacing and interest. Anyone who’s read all this might like me to learn. -30-
