It began simply enough, a friend loaned me some audiobooks. Since I drive long distances to and from work, I roared through his small audiobook collection in no time flat. Luckily he likes murder mysteries too. I loved reading Dick Francis and James Patterson—my aunt Toddy used to send me crates of books. But time has not been kind to my eyes. Besides, you can’t read a book while driving.
John Grisham I already knew, but Jonathan Kellerman and Lee Child were new to me. I found them a bit gritty but doable. But soon I ran out of audiobooks, but not the road, which led me to trolling thrift stores and eBay for new reads. At the Rohnert Park Goodwill, I found an audiobook by James Lee Burke, an author I had never heard of, called New Iberia Blues. I took a chance on it. The price was right.
Someone asked me what new habit will you take with you from your 14 months of pandemic isolation? My new habit, besides food hoarding, is listening to audiobooks. My new driving habit is listening to audiobooks in my car. There’s an Irish saying, a good story shortens the road.
Now I usually don’t like being read to, because I am a fast reader. In the past, I’ve shied away from audiobooks because I didn’t like a reader’s voice, or pacing. An audiobook is a three-way pact between the writer, the reader-interpreter, and the listener. There is nothing worse than being held hostage by a bad reader. They can sour a good storyline. I can’t finish that Kathy Reichs Bones novel because I can’t stand the reader’s voice.
Actors are often the worst readers of prose. Go figure. The woman who read Joan Didion’s memoir did it a disservice. Did you really just mispronounce that word? This is not a football fumble. There’s a comma there, use it—it’s not a run-on sentence. Oh FFS, don’t you even see the period? What is this, a California stop sign? Take a breath, fergawdsake. Don’t read like you’re stuck in the mortuary loo without TP. Do you even know what you’re reading?
If I’m arguing with a reader’s reading style, it’s more than a distraction, it’s an intrusion. And male readers interpreting female characters. Painful. Why the breathless soft girlie voice? Women don’t sound like that. It’s demeaning. Besides, I can’t hear the dialogue when you go all fem, I have to crank the volume up to full blast.
My current long and winding road obsession is James Lee Burke who writes pure poetry on the slant. I want to rewind, and listen again. And again. And again. Not something you can easily do with a car CD player. I about died when he described the sunset as the color of torn plums, or his run-on sentences when he waxes on about the secret depths of the bayou. This man has a bad case of metaphor and he knows how to use it.
I LOVE actor Will Patton’s ability to create distinct characters with just his voice. His pacing is brilliant. His interpretation is spot on. Gravel-voiced Cleet! Lisping Smiley! Under Patton’s deft touch, characters come alive. With other reader of Burke’s Montana stories, Tom Stechschulte, it’s hard to tell which character is speaking, and the reader audibly gasps for breath like a beached carp throughout. I do wish he’d give up smoking.
With Will Patton behind the wheel reading, New Iberia Blues was right up there with Pat Conroy’s seminal opening page of Prince of Tides, I tell you (my favorite opening paragraph, aside from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Well maybe also Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Alexander McColl’s Portuguese Irregular Verbs, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Books where the writing is so extraordinary that I find myself rereading a paragraph again and again, trapped within the beauty of words, I don’t know how to find my way back out of the labyrinth.
But all books come to an end. With good books, you linger in an afterglow, you might reread the last chapter to savor the mood. As I was listening to the closing lines of New Iberia Blues, it was sunset, I was on the road headed towards Bodega, with Santa Rosa behind me, and Burke’s parting words echoed my journey, driving home toward Bodega Bay at sunset. I mean, how synchronistic is that? Burke was literally described the very landscape I was driving through—with Alafair in Bodega. I had goosebumps. Get out of my head, I said. How often does something like that happen? Listening to a story’s end near the same place it ended? I was morose when the tale was done, and sat in the driveway a long time watching the stars arrive.
I needed a new read. Pronto. I was going through withdrawal. Preferably James Lee Burke. Get back on the horse. A friend suggested a free audiobook service, Libby, via my local library. During the pandemic, I’d been using Kanopy to watch movies but I didn’t realize there was a whole world of audiobooks out there—waiting. Untapped.
I resurrected a couple of old library cards. The more cards you hold, the more choices you have. Sadly the four libraries I belong to, Sonoma, Marin, Berkeley, and Oakland only have a meagre handful of James Lee Burke’s audiobooks via Libby. They have damnear every audiobook of Kellerman, Patterson, Grisham, Lee Child, etc. So I’ve been trolling eBay for James Lee Burke titles, which I will donate to a library, so others can enjoy this extraordinary, literate, funny writer, and yes, I got all those obscure literary references. I do. I do. Burke is a writer’s writer.
Just finished Neon Rain and A Private Cathedral. Surprisingly Burke’s first book is every bit as good and complex as New Iberia Blues. Laissez les bons temps rouler. I wanted to tell the character, Dave Robideaux that I have danced to Queen Ida, and Clifton Chenier, and I got to know his son in the gravel parking lot at the back of the Cotati Cabaret. Well, maybe a little pocololo was involved too. It was the 1980s. I may have breathed in but I never breathed out. Uisht! The tale of the Tyger.
Unfortunately the last batch of James Lee Burke titles I ordered from eBay were imprisoned in audio cassettes, not CDs. I am new to the concept of audiobooks. I did not see that one coming. Now I’m having to reinvent the square wheel of technology just so I can listen to the tapes. And then transcribe them so that my disabled friend can listen to them too. I mean, who even has an audiotape cassette player these days? Most people no longer even have CD players. Note to self: next time read the fucking fine print before you order audiobooks from eBay.
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