When I was maybe ten years old, my siblings and I went on a road trip. Naturally, we were not driving, the oldest of us being eleven. To pass the time, my dad put in an audiobook of The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey. It was on cassette tapes* from a squeaky plastic clamshell from the library, if you were looking to carbon date my age.
Obviously, this was not a democratic decision.
Now, I haven’t revisited this particular recording of The White Dragon, perhaps there have been other, better audiobook recordings done since then, but this particular one was the most boring thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life, for all ten minutes that I listened to it before falling asleep.
Which was a real shame, because it was about dragons, and, being ten, I really should have been more interested in it, because dragons are dope as hell.
Since that time, I decided that audiobooks weren’t for me. They were boring and would put me to sleep. This was reinforced by my partner’s love of audiobooks, which I also found very boring, and not just because he exclusively listens to Travis Baldree.**
My brilliant, childhood conclusion about the place of audiobooks in my life went unexamined until February of this very year, when I realized that I could not drive my gremlin around so they’d go to sleep, and read a book at the same time.*** I understand that this should have been obvious and that I was slow to come to this conclusion; if you think less of me for this, I can only assume that you don’t have children, and I love that for you. Please enjoy your complimentary consecutive REM cycles.
So I downloaded Libby because I’ll be damned if I have to share an Audible account with someone who thinks that Gideon the Ninth has very little worldbuilding.****
My very first audiobook that I picked out, as an adult, was To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, by Molly X Chang, narrated by Natalie Naudus. And you know what? I had a grand time with it. Sadly, the sequel doesn’t come out until 2027, but I’ll lurk.
Next was Starling House (Alix E. Harrow, also narr. by Natalie Naudus), and you know what? Turns out I only don’t like audiobooks if I don’t care about the book. I just looked at my stats right now, to write this post, and I listened to Starling House across three sessions. It’s a twelve hour book.
I’ve had some duds since then,***** but broadly speaking, audiobooks have entirely replaced physical books as my primary form of reading and I’m totally okay with that, because it lets me nurse my crush on Moira Quirk in peace.
I’ve seen a lot of folks on the interwebs defend audiobooks as legitimate reading, but I’ve never heard anyone say otherwise. Did I just enter the social media space at the wrong time to experience the anti-audio crusades? Let me know.
I will say, though, that there’s a lot to be said for what a good narrator can bring to the reading experience. I can’t say I’d have had as much fun with Gideon the Ninth if I’d been reading it (though now I would give my left leg (above the knee) for a fancy, pretty copy because of how much I love it), because the amount of anatomy that is in that book can get a little heavy and technical, and having to actually run my actual eyeballs across the actual words might have been a bit much for my delicate constitution. It would also have been highly unsanitary.
Every time you add a person to the creative process, it has an impact on the end product, and I think that’s just delightful. I have the privilege of knowing more than my fair share of actors******, which means that I’ve seen quite a few iterations of the same plays, and each and every time, I find them enchanting. The fingerprints of the whole team are all over the final production and there’s something really magical about the synthesis of good professionals who all love the work.
And I guess that’s the dream isn’t it? To be on such a team? It’s my dream, at any rate.
Recent Writing
Wayne laughed. “Because [witches are] not ‘normal people,’ whatever that is, and because you learn real quick that if you’re not honest with yourself, you’re going to have big-ass problems, so you ask the dumb questions and the silly questions and the questions that sound the same as the other questions but you’re not sure you understood the answer, because all the answers reveal something, and the way you take the answers reveals something, and all of that makes you better.”
“That’s a lot of work.”
“Witchery is when we look at reality and say, ‘no, I can do better.’ That’s a lot of work.”
Next time I’ll talk about waiting.
Do good, friends.
*Cassette tapes are a form of audio preservation where plastic is stretched very thin, and then a sound is projected at it, and the trauma of this experience is such that when you run the thin plastic across a very fine brush, it will repeat that sound until the plastic is worn through from the stress and breaks.
**Mr. Baldree is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but listening to snippets of various properties narrated by the same man has lead me to the conclusion that there is a Travis Baldree Extended Universe that includes Cradle, Beware of Chicken, and Legends and Lattes, among others, and I did not find any of this particularly interesting or easy to follow.
***I am aware that podcasts exist. Toddler podcasts are not especially good for my personal wakefulness, and Behind the Bastards is not appropriate fare for toddlers. While the gremlin does not, at this time, speak English, the last thing I need is for their first words to be “Doritos over Dictators.”
****We listen and we don’t judge. Personally, I think that progression fantasy is among the most boring things to exist, nobody’s perfect.
*****Assistant to the Villain… I DNFed at less than 1%. I’m sure the book is lovely, but it’ll have to wait until I can read it with my eyes.
******And I’m keeping them. They are my hoard, these actor friends of mine, and I do not share.
Then They Kissed 