Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

I have an infuriating friend who messes with my shopping suggestions by asking my Alexa about hemorrhoids and sex toys and wart remover.

 

Has it recommended Empress Theresa yet? Whenever I buy something from Amazon, ads for the exact same book/item/service start following me around the web like lovelorn tweens.

 

No it hasn't done that for the same thing, unless asking me
to buy something again counts? Amazon doesn't tend to do
that with books.

 

Must stop falling asleep to horror audiobooks! Today's nightmares were brought to me by Dan Simmons. Thank you Dan. Scary stuff.

 

The above post reminds me of an annoyance, and that is that I can’t listen to audio books in general. I love the idea - relaxing, not having to hold a book or strain your eyes, but my brain just can’t accept them. I’m so preoccupied by listening to the tone of the narrator’s voice, their accent, how they stress words or don’t stress them when I feel they should. How they pronounce certain words, waiting for them to stutter or fluff a line.... that I find I’m not listening to the story at all. Listening to an audio book leaves me about as detached as it’s possible to be from a story.

 

Same here, but I think the problem is that the reader doesn't (can't) read aloud nearly as fast as I read to myself, and it throws off my timing. It seems to take forever to get through a chapter.

 

I've listened to a lot of audiobooks/audio plays when I was traveling by train regularly. Made me fall asleep...

Nowadays I only listen to special audiobooks, and read along the print-/e-book. Special, as in special performers or performances. For instance, Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries read by Kevin R. Free, which are the only reading so far that sounds exactly as I imagined. And Wil Wheaton is always a treat, in particularly when he's doing a John Scalzi book.

 

UK FLOOD NEWS

Knobs in their properties with door plates proclaiming 'RiverSide,' and 'WatersMeet' and their post-apocalyptic apoplexy at the condition of having to throw away the carpet.

Meanwhile in York they were rather more robust, 'business as usual' they said to Harry TV aged 84 wearing his ski coat from '84. [Local]

 

It's fascinating how differently our brains can work. You sound almost like me talking about paper books. I'm so distracted by the medium itself. Don't get me wrong, I probably read an hour a day, but it's mostly magazine, wiki and blog articles, rarely real books. A few pages into a sit-down with a book, and I'm counting sentences in paragraphs I think needed a break five lines ago and obsessing over punctuation choices to the degree that comprehension suffers and I start to wonder if I'll get through the remaining 83% of the book at this rate, because I just did the math, and that's exactly how far in I am.

Even a bad reader on an audiobook is better for me. I truck through book after book with better comprehension and retention than I ever could in print. That just seems to be the way my brain works. And when a reader makes a choice I don't like, it sort of gets filtered through my mind's ear into the way I would have read it. If I couldn't do that, I'd probably quit fairly early in at least one out of ten books, probably more.

I never listen at the originally recorded speed. Audible and the Smart Audiobook app I use both allow you to crank up the speed without changing pitch. In novels with drama and dialog, I probably listen at an average of 1.2x, depending on the reader. That also makes every hour last fifty minutes, which is nice on a forty-hour Stephen King. On non-fiction, I often listen at 1.5x or higher. Again, not if there's good drama though. I listened to In Cold Blood at 1.3x, but that guy's a super slow reader. He sounds conversational at that speed. I can't stand him at lower speeds. Conversely, I listened to The Whole Brain Child as fast as I could comprehend the words.

 

I know @Jud is family 'an all - but on a writer forum of all places...sniff, reading books are boring, those listening books is shitty is very much Fifth Columnnist behaviour, you traitor, Quisling, and on..

 

Wil Wheaton's performance on Ready Player One was wonderful. He just plain gets nerd media. I have several favorite celebrity reads from the last few years: Donald Sutherland's The Old Man and the Sea, Claire Danes's The Handmaid's Tale, Jeremy Irons's Lolita, John Hodgman's Year Zero, so many good ones. Steven Weber's IT was an amazing performance, one of my favorites ever, and anything both written and read by Neil Gaiman is like honey butter biscuits for your ears. I love his voice!

 

Audio book (listening) semi-connoisseur here.

• for falling asleep — low grade sci-fi quietly narrated by Ms or Mr Monotone (remember to set the sleep timer)
• to shorten motorway miles — go for the well produced classics (well trained and paid voice artists trump celebrity)
• for quick fixes — can slacken off and permit some crackanory or celebrity readings of 3000 word (ish) shorts (established short story writers see ranker top 100)
• for full, awake not much else matters, engagement – well, I've not quite mastered the filtering for this so go for sampling (many and frequently). You'll instinctively know when you've found one, revelatory — like getting one's bottom pinched on public transport.

 

Not liking that, lewd and overwhelmingly lucid.

My favourite at the moment is Arthur Lowe’s Diary of a Nobody on the YouTube. [wont link due to social pressures/non crime crimes issue]

 

Ha ha. I forget the sleep timer, and it makes for fun - if unrestful - weirdness on the dreamscape. I find the secret to full engagement is, for me at least, diversity. I try not to listen to too many from the same genre or era in a row.


I love audiobooks. I don't just like them as a substitute. No, I genuinely enjoy the medium. I'm basically listening to an audiobook any time I'm not writing, reading, typing, conversing or doing math. Oh, or watching TV/Movies. That's just plain silly. I drive, work, workout, cook, do chores and even play video games while I listen. Once I really got on this kick a couple of years ago, I couldn't stop. I've chewed through more audiobooks in the last two years than I did my first twenty years out of high school reading paper books. There's no way I could ever finish 144 books in a year on a Kindle.

I retain it too. Some people can't, and I understand completely, but for me, it's actually easier. I learn more; I write more confidently; I have legitimate opinions on classic and modern literature beyond HST and Vonnegut! I love it.

 

I love audiobooks so much. I have ever since I got Audible, 3 years ago this summer (my first ever real book back in the day was The Hobbit spread across a bunch of cassettes, but between then and "now" I haven't really used them).

I could pretty much have written your post myself. I have a habit of falling asleep to audiobooks, and it certainly adds interesting color to your dreams. And to your interpretation of the book. I'd fall asleep to the same segments of the same books several times in a row, and get this mishmash of disjointed scenes, which my subconscious nevertheless manages to fit together into some sort of story (which is sometimes even better than the actual book).

While there are certain books that demand I close my eyes and give the story my all, I always listen to something when doing compatible chores and activities: working out, doing dishes, cooking, and anything to do with visual art. One of my favorite pairings has become non-fiction (autobiographies for preference) while doing tattoo design in CorelDraw. Weirdly specific, I know, but apparently this is what my brain craves.

Audiobooks have also helped round off some unsightly edges on my English. Namely, listening comprehension and knowing how words are pronounced. It's different than movies and things, because you can't rely on those visual clues. Not a huge improvement by any means, but it's left an attractive glossy finish.

So yeah, love'em. I'm a little sad that I don't read as many print books anymore, though. They have their merits also. It just feels a little bit like wasting time, what with the multitasking potential of audiobooks. It's quite ironic that one as lazy as me has to learn to relax. I know more than a few people who'd get a laugh out of the very idea.

 

Yep, I've done that. Most of the time, I have a separate book I'm listening to at bedtime, usually some light-hearted adventure, nothing intense. It's a great time to catch up on all the kids' books I never read, Peter Pan, Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, every Roald Dahl book. There's a Librivox reading of Grimm's Fairy Tales that zonks me out with his grandfatherly timber. I might try that one again. I slept great for a several months there. (It takes a very long time to get through sixty-three stories if you fall asleep in minutes.) Sometimes I'll do a sci-fi book I'm also listening to in the day though. I think I had an eight-hour-long dream about Ender's Shadow once when I forgot to set the timer. That was amazing! World War Z was cool too. Not very restful though. And you're right, when I back it up and start where I fell asleep, somehow it's an entirely different story! So bizarre.

Yeah, this too! I have trouble explaining that one to people, especially avid readers, but my ADD brain actually retains more information when my floating attention is occupied in multitasking, so I can tell you more about a book I listened to while playing Zelda or driving than I can when I shut out all distractions and read. I get so much done, important or not, and I get more out of the story anyway. The idea of sitting and staring at a book becomes very unappealing at that point. I've even started blowing off movies I want to see, because all I'm going to do is sit for two hours. That, and the book is probably better anyway. Now that's the one that people would laugh to hear me say, because I have always been a cinema fiend and never a big reader. I say it constantly now though, the book was better!

 

I don’t recall saying books were boring. Maybe I did - it’s the type of thing I’d say.

 

Yeah, well, you're in England, so you drive on the wrong side of the road, too. And your buses have two levels, complete with a flight of stairs. Do you have modern buses with escalators in them? Because if you did, that would be awesome.

Anyway, read books even if they're boring. They build character and stuff.

 

I was watching a British movie on Netflix yesterday, and the 'up' escalator at the airport was on the left, so they have that wrong, too.

 

I couldn’t tell you. I’m too posh for buses. In fact I’d rather go by shanks’s pony than bus.

 

Buses are new posh.
...

No, apols an' all...but you said you'd maybe read 10% of the books you had purchased from Jeff Bezos? - and it was the night after the Panorama documentary about Amazon doorbells taking over the world?

- I was [duty]bound to hit out at a storm trooper in my midsts, if only in duty. It was on the BBC by the way if you remember them [hysterical, shrill and vegan].

 

We did have very long bendy buses for a few years, so as to avoid the need for a second deck. But then we gave them to Malta.

ETA:

 

That doesn’t mean I find books boring. It just means I’m a shit reader. Not a shit reader in that I read books on scat, but that I’m not very good at it.

 

Do you know about the Bristol scale? I know about the Bristol scale. It's one of those things that only special people know about. Also, I just applied for my bus pass

 

I do now, and I found it far more amusing than I probably should. I’ll have to start having a look before I flush... see where most of my motions sit in the chart.