November 1st 2009
After hearing Stephen Fry promoting the joys of audio books, particularly for background while walking, I decided to give one a try. I've just finished with my first one and thought I would share the experience, and why I will be more selective in future.
'Finished with' is more suitable here than 'finished' as I never reached the end of The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown; I gave up. I'll explain why in a moment, but first the technical considerations.
I listened to The Lost Symbol while walking and before going to bed. This gave me a major problem in that the book is 16 hours long, split into two 8 hour files. That is a lot of audio to navigate through when you want to start and stop.
While walking it wasn't so much of an issue as stopping the player at a position meant I could go keep going from that point on a little later; however, inevitably, I found that my mind would wander and I would have to rewind back to where I was. This isn't a simple matter and I often found I went ten or twenty minutes too far, or that I had missed a bit, heard a bit, then missed a bit again and needed to go back even further when I realised characters were being referred to whose introduction I had missed.
Listening to it in bed was worse because I was going to fall asleep at some point and I would have to start from the beginning to find my place again the next day.
These simply aren't issues with real books. Clearly you can't read a real book while walking, but pages don't keep turning when you zone out and, even if you drop it, it is generally a simple matter to find your place again if you fall asleep reading.
The biggest issue though, and the one that stopped me listening at all, is that I naturally skip a lot of the 'filler' when I read. It is a simple matter to turn back a page or two if you inadvertantly skip something with actualy story in it. With the audio book you are forced to listen to it. Not unlike watching an episode of Lost, this gets tedious pretty quickly.
In the end these diversions from the story and explanations of the obvious for 'slower' readers just become too much, and this is why it is important to be selective. Dan Brown's writing style doesn't lend itself well to Audio Books as he explains the same things over and over throughout the book, no doubt, as a reminder. It reminded me a great of the horrible, 'Previously on...' pre-title sequences that more and more TV shows are getting these days.
It also matters a lot that the person reading the book does so in the style you would read it in yourself. The Lost Symbol is peppered with unnecessry half thoughts by the characters which can be easily overlooked in the book but which when spoken aloud become clumsy, and annoying. I also found that the reader approached some of the content in a way that left the thoughts of the enemy sounding like slightly camp vanity instead of the dark madness that I would have read into it.
This isn't intended to be a review of The Lost Symbol, if you want to know if it is any good then go and read it, but as an audio book I couldn't take it.
I suspect I would have similar issues with many audio books. It is a little like watching a movie adaptation of a book you have already read and finding the directors vision to be entirely alien to you, except that you are being presented with his vision and the original text together. I already have another audio book lined up, one that I think will be far easier to digest. It isn't fiction, which I think should make all the difference, it is broken up into individual chapters, and much of it is read by the original author.
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