On audiobooks and James Lee Burke

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.

After a year+ in isolation, my new habit is…

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.