Dave's Fiction Warehouse

A few more thoughts about audio books: When listening to books set in Britain, a narrator with a British accent is just the thing. I recently checked out Ngaio Marsh's Last Ditch from the State Library of Kansas , and the last couple of nights I've been listening to the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I've read all the Sherlock Holmes stories many times, of course, but hearing them narrated in the stage-trained British voice of Edward Hartwicke added a certain dimension of drama and humor. Same with Last Ditch . Narrator Nadia May is not just reading the book; she's performing it. So it's quite true what an earlier commenter noted: When selecting audio books, the narrator is just as important as the author. Let's just say you wouldn't want Joan Rivers reading Anna Karenina . I still have problems with audiobooks: I still tend to fall asleep before making the conscious decision to shut off the player. And with my non-iPod player, there's still no way ...

Until recently, my only experience with audio books was through the cassette player in my old Subaru, listening to some Louis L'Amour tapes my mom loaned me for the long drive from Montana to Philadelphia. Maybe it was the road noise, or maybe it was Louis L'Amour, but somewhere on a particularly tedious stretch through Indiana, I concluded that audio books were not really my cup of tea. Listening to books, my attention tends to wander. Sometimes half a chapter will go by before it returns. By then I'm not sure who's shooting who, and trying to rewind to just the right spot when you're driving is sort of like texting when you're driving -- the sport of fools. Also, I have this problem when male readers do women's voices, and vice versa. It just seems faintly ridiculous, and takes me out of the story. But recently my friend Yvonne showed me the wonders of the New York Public Library 's audio book collection. For a flat fee you get access to thousands of t...