Gah! Abridged audiobooks make no sense whatsoever. Like sending a novel out to a chopshop. What? Where was I? Who? Huh? #dogsbreakfast. Never again. I am feeling openly hostile like I want to do violence to someone or something. Now that may be a bit over the top, but I don’t like anyone messing with my sublime reading experience. Once upon a time, I worked too hard in order to learn how to read.
Abridged books is like a chopshop for novels. Bits and pieces do not make a vehicle. I just wasted three hours listening to a mangled abridged version of Burning Angel. Ditto that with In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. Mishmash on speed dial. I am so angry I could spit.
The thing is, I’m fairly new to the whole audiobooks concept. As a rule of thumb, I really don’t like to be read aloud to most of the time, precisely because I read super fast, my mind races along at breakneck speed, and when someone reads to you albeit poorly, it’s sometimes hard to follow along. And sometimes my mind wanders along the furrows between the words. Since the pandemic, it’s been really hard for me to read, the words are like sawdust. I don’t retain anything. Too OCD for words. So my new audiobook reading habit has restored an old pleasure.
However, when you have an unabridged novel, you invest in some 14 hours worth of being read to, so you really get to know the characters, and the motivation behind their actions. It’s a developing relationship. Out of fiction, truth is wrested to the ground.
My current crush is James Lee Burke, a complicated and complex writer who waxes poetic—right up there with Pat Conroy. I prefer the reading style of Will Patton to Mark Hammer. But both do a bang up job. The full length novels come alive under their expert touch. The abridged novels are merely ordinary, and that’s not why I read.
I just wrote a note to James Lee Burke who will be interviewed via Zoom this evening.
“Looking forward to tonight’s interview with John Grisham. And I do love the audiobooks (new to me), narrated by Will Patton. Mark Hammer’s narration is growing on me too.
I have a huge complaint against those abridged editions. The few abridged versions I have listened to, fell flat and I didn’t realize they were abridged until later, all the juicy metaphor and the interior dialogue about the mores of society were expunged from Burning Angel. Ditto that with Confederate Dead. It’s as if they’re different books. There oughta be a law. But beggars can’t be choosers.
What makes your books so extraordinary is the sheer attention to detail, the layered, sustained metaphor, call it poetry on its side, and also the ongoing complex interior dialogue of the protagonist.
So I’m listening to Burning Angel again to get the bits I missed. I am only a couple of hours into the long version, but there is so much more to the story than what was left in than the abridged version.”
“James Lee Burke uses the past to inform the present.”—Michael Connelly. Books & Books webinar via CrowdCast, on right now.
James Lee Burke considers that his best three books are from the Holland saga, modeled after his mother’s pioneering family. I would argue that New Iberia Blues is right up there on the list.1. Wayfaring Stranger
2. House of the Rising Sun
3. The Jealous Kind
4. Another Kind of Eden, a new release, with a nod to Steinbeck.
There was some repetition in the second interview with Michael Connolly, but they did actually read my comment aloud on the air.
I said, “What makes your books so extraordinary is the attention to detail, the detailed sustained metaphor, call it poetry on its side, and also the ongoing complex interior dialogue of the protagonist.”
One can never have enough library cards. It’s a kind of future wealth. During the pandemic lockdown, they took on a whole new currency. I gathered up all my defunct library cards and renewed them all. It began with the Kanopy app., and soon I was in the cyberworld of movies and books.
I have a Kindle, but my eyes are less agile, less forgiving, and take umbrage with me much sooner than when I want to stop reading, so listening to audiobooks is a new workaround. Otherwise, I force my eyes to read with stronger and stronger reading classes until the muscle bleeds and then I look like a deranged vampire on the loose.
Libby, and Hoopla by Overdrive have large inventories of audiobooks. The more library cards you have, the larger the library. James Lee Burke is kind of hard to find, it takes me four cards and two different app systems to access most of his work. I supplement the rest on eBay. I listen to audiobooks when I drive, a new pandemic habit. Listening to audiobooks on my iPad before I drop off to sleep, is a fairly new habit, but at least it lets me sleep. Or maybe it is better to say that the audiobooks let me unwind, thus blocking my otherwise endless worry tapes.
See, I didn’t learn to read until the end of 3rd grade, then it was Game on! I read everything I could get my hands on. I particularly loved the SRA reading series, but I couldn’t answer the questions at the end. I still didn’t have those logic and comprehension skills down pat. I had to wait another decade or two before that switch flipped.
Audiobooks are a great narcoleptic, you can set the timer, then later go back where you left off, or were last conscious. Burke is so good, that I don’t mind rehearing sentences. Interestingly enough, if someone is a plain, ordinary writer, say, a hack writer churning out novels, they just don’t pass muster in the audiobook format. I will sometimes read writers, not because they are particularly good writers, but because they have a compelling story line. Audiobooks quickly weeds out those writers.
And then there are the readers who should never read books out loud. So many actors assume that they are good readers, and they are not. The ones who don’t know which verbs to punch up, the ones who ignore punctuation. The ones who mouth the words but don’t know what they are reading, or worse, they mispronounce words. I want to metaphorically bitch slap them for doing such a terrible job of reading aloud. It’s a disservice to both the author and the listener. It’s a crime against the ears. To find the right alchemy of author and reader in an audiobook format is pure magic.
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