Kelly,
I like this status report thing. Keeping me honest. Hah!
Well. My plan to "listen" to Postwar is a total and utter failure. I basically feel like I have been listening to that sucker *forever*, and then today went to check my progress in the actual book to find out that I am only about a quarter of the way through it. Argh!
I think there are a few problems. One is that the material is just too dense for an audiobook. I'm having trouble keeping track of all the facts and figures, etc. Also, I don't love the narrator and find it sort of hard to listen to for long stretches. I am sort of annoyed by how I notice the change in audio...I don't know how to describe this because I don't have a great vocabulary for it. But, I can tell when the recording switches, as if he's reading on a new day? There's not smooth transitions and sometimes it's a little louder or softer or his pacing seems different. There are obviously lots of foreign names and places, and I can tell that he went back later and rerecorded just the names. It's super distracting. I think I have to abandon the audiobook plan. I'm honestly not sure where that leaves me. Maybe I'll just try to knock out a few chapters every week with the goal of finishing it by the end of the year.
I also abandoned one of my books this year, Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Presuming I can finish Postwar, that means I have to choose 2 out of the remaining: Please Look After Mom, All the Names, or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I'm thinking it's going to be All the Names that's left on the road, but we'll see.
I'm at that point in October when I really want to wrap it up and thinking about next year's list---so excited we're making plans for that!
Maybe I just need to read a little more Postwar today to feel that sense of forward progress.
Jenny
As you know, I listen to a lot of aBooks (just finished The Devil Wears Prada this week -- have you read that book? It's better than the movie [hard to imagine -- that's a great movie!]... at least, story-wise. Also, good narrator). Annnywhooo... a good aBook really has to have a lot more going for it to be enjoyable. First, you have to be able to follow the story which, in the case of a dense history, seems like would be difficult. And secondly.. a good narrator (and honestly, if a narrator is good enough, s/he should be able to help you out with the first thing! I'm not sure I would have made it through reading Sea Wolf on my own but the narrator totally kept me interested). Aaand... it sounds like you had neither. It pisses me off when I can hear inconsistencies in the narrator -- did you buy that book from audible? If so, you can return it.
ReplyDeleteFor a fast reader, I also think aBooks can be annoying because someone reading aloud will *always* take longer than reading it in your head (even if you're *not* that fast of a reader, actually. Heh.) My friend Jan struggles sometimes when she listens to an aBook and says, "Just finish it already!!" It's a different mindset, for sure. But it's going to make a long book *even longer* which is, of course, no good.