I finished listening to Salem’s Lot via audio-book on Thursday and since then I’ve been hunting for something to fill the void for my commute. I hate driving but discovering audio-books has made it bearable these last few months. In fact, the last two books — Land of Lincoln and Salem’s Lot — actually had me looking forward to the commute, anxious to find out what was going to happen next. So, now I’m ready for something new and I checked my “To Read” list.
That is where the frustration began. Ninety-five percent of the books on my list do not even have audio-book versions and the ones that do only have abridged versions. Why would anyone want an abridged version of a book? I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to get the whole story, wouldn’t want to relish every morsel the author has carefully chosen. To me, it’s like watching the Harry Potter movies that have been chopped up for time’s sake but in my opinion they’ve left out important information and clues that J. K. Rowling meant for us to dwell on. There wasn’t a single scene in her books that wasn’t carefully crafted to share something important about the story not just of that particular book but the entire story arc of the seven books. I hated that the movie version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire completely left out Dobby and the house elves, but particularly Dobby. To me, you lose something in an abridged version of a book so I can’t understand why anyone would want to read or listen to one.
I really wanted to listen to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood next but all downloadable versions I can find are abridged and the CD audio-book is also abridged. In fact, the only way you can get the unabridged version is on cassette, which makes no sense to me. It seems it would have been cheaper to record the unabridged version on the CD medium. Well, there’s no way I’m getting the cassette version onto my iPod.
I thought about listening to Confederates in the Attic which is another writer’s journey similar to Land of Lincoln only Southern. This one was written by a war correspondent who returns from Iraq and starts his personal journey intrigued by Civil War reenactors. Of course, the only version is abridged.
There’s also no version of the Audrey Hepburn biography I want to read, the only audio-book for The Six Wives of Henry VIII is abridged, and forget finding anything for my books on women soldiers and spies in the Civil War and WWII.
So I don’t know what I’m going to listen to. Apparently I don’t have common enough interests. I’d get another Stephen King book, but I think two in a row in the same genre would give me weird dreams. Plus, not even all of his books are unabridged.
And that’s not even all of it. I want to download some t.v. episodes to watch on my trip to New Mexico in December. I haven’t tried watching video on my iPod so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. The thing is that there’s not a lot of t.v. that I haven’t watched that I want to see. The two shows I would be interested in watching the first season of are the new Dr. Who and Dead Zone. I haven’t seen any of either but I’ve been told that the new Dr. Who is pretty good and Dead Zone looks pretty intriguing but it’s been on so long that I’d want to see it from the beginning.
Well, of course, only the last few seasons of Dead Zone are available for download and none of Dr. Who are available. I couldn’t even find Dr. Who on DVD.
Clearly, this download to iPod thing is more complicated and frustrating than the marketing lets on or like Shakespeare said, “This is the winter of my discontent” or something like that.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve just got into audio books myself, I like it when I’ve got my hands busy with something else.
ooooh - have you checked out “Torchwood’? I was expecting a typical spin-off - something very much like Dr. Who, but it is definitely something different (in a good way!)
I’ve been watching Torchwood as it airs actually. I’ve been perplexed as to why all of the women on the show have crushes on Owen. I mean, he’s cute, but every single one of them, even Susie, has had the major hots for him. He’s not that spectacular.
My favorite episode so far was the one with the people disappearing in the town and it turned out to just be cannibal townspeople, no aliens.
Dr. Who seasons 1 and 2 are absolutely available on DVD, and I loved them wholeheartedly. As a kid who grew up on the old version they did an excellent job of both keeping the spirit and jazzing it up for the new century. Keep looking. I know it’s on Netflix…
The original Dr. Who was the only thing I was allowed to stay up late for. It would come on at 11pm on Saturday nights and they would run the whole episode which could be anywhere from 2 to 3 1/2 hours sometimes. Ah, all the fake monsters, The Master, Ramona, Leila, K-9, the scarf — such fun!