Monday, September 09, 2013

Will You Read To Me?

What does one do when an extremely persistent eye infection forces one to spend days at home eschewing any sort of "strain" to the eye? My usual past-times of reading and wasting endless hours on the internet were clearly out. Even watching TV, something I generally try to avoid, was banned by The Husband, who was very effectively playing policeman over my eye activities.

What DOES one do? It turns out that one sleeps a lot. One sleeps amounts that one didn't think possible, ending up in a disoriented half-moronic state of mind.  And then the doctor says one should keep one's eyes open as much as possible - which is sound advice generally speaking, except that she meant it in the literal sense, of course. 

One listens to music, and gets tired of one's paltry music collection pretty quickly. One taps out long soliloquies to oneself on one's online diary, with one's eyes fixed on some distant point (mustn't strain one's eyes, you see). And yes, one employs the same method to tap out disjointed blog posts. One hopes that the few minutes needed to correct one's typos won't strain the eye too much. 

A couple of days of this, and I was thoroughly bored. Then The Husband came up with a brilliant idea - he suggested that I try audio-books. 

Now, personally, I've never liked the concept of audio-books. Listening to an audio-book isn't the same as reading a book, is it? Where's the pleasure of converting those black squiggles into an image, a scene, a narrative; and where having a voice drone those very words into one's ears? And more to the point - it's cheating! Having a book read to you is so much easier than actually reading it yourself.

But considering the state I was in (still am in, in fact) - something was better than nothing. A quick search on Google Play later, I downloaded the LibriVox app. It's a pretty cool concept - public domain books read out aloud for free by volunteers from all over the world. 

The first book I attempted to listen to was Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. Now, Dickens is a guy who has always managed to put me to sleep quite effectively. I hoped an audio-book might be slightly better. Unfortunately, it turned out be an even more effective soporific than reading the book. The poor reader read quite a few chapters into my ears while I slept heedless. 

My next attempt was Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess of Mars. And it turned out to be just the ticket - full of action and never a quiet moment to push me off to Sleepland. Though I finished the book, it wasn't good enough to make me want to continue with the series. My third (and current) audio-book is Uncle Tom's Cabin, the novel that supposedly started the American Civil War. 

The app is pretty intuitive and easy to use, except that it sometimes gets stuck between chapters. It even has a sleep mode for people who're listening to the audio-book in bed, and don't want the book to run on all night after they fall asleep. The readers, despite being volunteers, are surprisingly good! The reader of Uncle Tom's Cabin is just incredible - he does different voices for different characters (even the women), and the way he does the accents is just astounding.

So am I a convert to audio-books? Meh. No. I'll admit that they don't really take away the pleasure of converting those words into images and sounds, but the concept still seems too much like cheating to me.
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