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.
