Audiobooks

It’s going to be a slightly quiet day today.  After I bid on a couple of projects, I’m going to listen to The Secret Garden and clean the house.  The link is to a free audiobook, by the way.  It’s not a professional recording, but the reader is quite good for a layman.   A lot of the Librivox books are read by several different people and I often find that distracting, but this one has the same reader throughout.

Though sometimes the different readers can be fun.  The accent of the woman who reads the first chapter of Three Men and a Boat: To say nothing of the dog by Jerome K. Jerome is absolutely charming.  She’s Indian and still manages to get the flavor Victorian masculine humor across very well.  The whole book is very funny.  I read it because it was mentioned in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. And he’s right about the pineapple scene.

I started getting Librivox downloads because I wanted to cut expenses and my Audible.com membership was an expense I figured it would be easy to cut. Basically, I was getting an audiobook a month for about fifteen bucks.  Which, I grant you, is cheap.  If you buy ’em in the store, they’re much more expensive.

I have close to 100 unabridged audiobooks. (I blame this on my mother.  She addicted me to being read to in the crib).   These days, I generally like to listen to something while I do chores I might not be enthused about.  Washing dishes is boring?  Hell, who cares?  I’m listening to a story!

My next listen is going to be Heart of the Hunter by a friend of mine, Sam Chupp. He’s a “real writer” in a way I’m not.  He’s been paid for fiction. (Sorry, unless you’re there, it’s hard to understand why this might seem like magic).

Maybe I oughta talk the man of the house into reading one of my novels as a podcast…