audiobook list, January through October 2019
The following is a list of the 34 audiobooks (for varying definitions of "book") that I have listened to in January through October, 2019. They are more or less in chronological order by listening date. (I say "more or less" because Amazon's content-management function lists items by purchase date, and while my Audible app mostly lists by "last date you did something with this item," where "did something" can be either "listened to it" OR "purchased it" OR "downloaded it to your phone," sometimes parts of it glitch back to purchase order.)
Anyway, the list:
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1. The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World, by Robert Garland (Great Courses, 24 hours 28 minutes)
-----Or more accurately, in the ancient Mediterranean world (Egypt, Greece, Rome, with a few digressions into Mesopotamia and Persia) and in medieval England. Garland's unexamined ethnocentrism grates after a while, but there's a bunch of useful information in here. (Just ignore most of what he says once he gets to the medieval period, particularly about the Vikings.)
2. Jingle Bell Pop, by John Seabrook (Audible free member offer, 1 hour 14 minutes)
-----A history of how/when/why various songs entered the "canon" of American Christmas music. Slight but entertaining.
3. Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 6 hours)
-----Which should probably be subtitled "maybe let's not skim over Mesopotamia and Anatolia/Persia so fast before diving into Greek history, hey?" This is fairly introductory level stuff, but well organized and interesting. Also, a note about Prof. Harl, since I have been listening to a bunch of his courses: he has a strong Brooklyn (or Brooklyn-adjacent) accent and a kind of strident speaking pattern, which I understand some listeners find off-putting, but which I find oddly endearing because it makes him sound like he's really into whatever he's talking about.
4. The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague, by Dorsey Armstrong (Great Courses, 12 hours 10 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. My one gripe is that Prof. Armstrong treats the course a bit too much like an actual college course where students can go several days between lectures and therefore includes a sort of five-minute "as we discussed in the previous lecture..." catch-up section at the start of each new lecture. This gets old fast if you're listening to a bunch in a row on a long drive. *wry* Other than that, very interesting and informative.
5. Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed, by Edwin Barnhart (Great Courses, 23 hours 15 minutes)
-----Fascinating and informative. You could easily make a whole course (or multiple courses) on any one of the cultures Prof. Barnhart discusses here.
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6. Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Empire, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 18 hours 29 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. I particularly like this one because Prof. Harl doesn't stop at "and then he conquered Persia and died young" the way a lot of world histories do, but actually talks about how Alexander worked to govern Persia, the details of his northeastern conquests and march through the Indus river valley, and so on.
7. Lost Worlds of South America, by Edwin Barnhart (Great Courses, 11 hours 51 minutes)
-----Not as good as Prof. Barnhart's lecture series on Mesoamerica and North America, but still quite interesting. Again, you could do multiple lecture series on any of the cultures he deals with. It continues to annoy me that it's easy to find all kinds of detailed examinations of Euro-centric history and peoples, but like pulling teeth to find non-specialist works on pre-contact American history that get more detailed than general surveys. *sigh*
8. Money Management Skills, by Michael Finke (Great Courses, 6 hours 9 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin.
9. The Addictive Brain, by Thad A. Polk (Great Courses, 6 hours 19 minutes)
-----A study of addiction from a neurobiological perspective. Very interesting.
10. Folsom Untold: The Strange True Story of Johnny Cash's Greatest Album, by Danny Robins (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 21 minutes)
-----Way overdone, did not need to be more than about one hour long, but there are worse ways to kill a couple hours and/or help get myself through a day of chores.
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11. The Story of Human Language, by John McWhorter (Great Courses, 18 hours 15 minutes)
-----Weirdly, I have no memory of the contents of this lecture series? I mean, I'm pretty sure I did listen to it, and I vaguely recall thinking it was all right, but damned if I could tell you a single thing about it. Possibly it just blended together with my other random linguistics-by-osmosis knowledge. (Look, my brother has a masters in linguistics. I picked up a lot of random stuff by proxy.)
12. Rome and the Barbarians, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 18 hours 24 minutes)
-----On the construction of "us" versus the other, and also broadening the focus away from Germans and Gauls/Britons to talk about peoples on ALL borders of the Roman Empire.
13. The Demon Next Door, by Bryan Burrough, read by Steve White (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 45 minutes)
-----True crime story about a serial killer in a moderate-sized Texas town. Annoyingly black-and-white view of morality/personality traits, but I think that's typical for the genre. Also Audible now thinks I am a true crime fan, which is inaccurate.
14. Freakonomics: Revised Edition, by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, read by Stephen J. Dubner (Audible daily deal, 7 hours 51 minutes)
-----My general reaction is something along the lines of "okay then" and a shrug. I suspect this book may be a victim of its own success, in that the authors' points have been spread far enough that they seem like "doesn't everyone already know that?" ideas rather than something new and interesting.
15. How to Grow Anything: Food Gardening for Everyone, by Melinda Myers (Great Courses, 5 hours 59 minutes)
-----This does not work well as an audio-only media experience. I mean, there are still a bunch of useful gardening tips! But there are long sections where Myers is clearly potting a bunch of plants and demonstrating stuff visually that are either boring or straight-up unintelligible without the accompanying visuals.
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16. An Economic History of the World since 1400, by Donald J. Harreld (Great Courses, 24 hours 25 minutes)
-----Decent general introduction to integrated world economic history, but I have taken actual college courses on this subject and done some additional reading for fun, and as a result found 90% of this very "been there, done that." Which is not the course's fault, but there you are.
17. History's Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach, by Gregory S. Aldrete (Great Courses, 12 hours 12 minutes)
-----This one's a little cockeyed since, IIRC, Aldrete is not actually a military historian, and honestly some of these are less... hmmm... the theme is less "blunders" pure and simple and more on how people's ethnocentrism, discomfort with new technology, and general personality conflict stuff can get in the way of sensible assessment and preparation and lead people to shoot themselves in the foot from the tactical level all the way up to grand strategy. Anyway, very interesting though I'd like to hear an actual military historian do a sort of DVD commentary on this, just for kicks.
18. Masters of War: History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers, by Andrew R. Wilson (Great Courses, 12 hours 13 minutes)
-----Should more accurately be titled "a history of military strategic thought from ancient times to today," since that's what it is. It does that job very effectively, and was especially interesting to listen to right after the military blunders lecture series, since there were occasional moments of overlap when Wilson talked about specific battle examples that led to various schools of thought or that showed people attempting to put various strategies into action.
19. Cities of the Ancient World, by Steven L. Tuck (Great Courses, 11 hours 48 minutes)
-----A discussion of various ancient cities in the Mediterranean world (with a brief digression to Mohenjo Daro), starting from the beginning of urban life all the way up to the founding of Constantinople. Prof. Tuck is interested in both the physical layout and logistics of cities, as well as the social organization of the people who live in them. This is a really interesting subject!
20. The Sawbones Book, by Justin McElroy and Dr. Sydnee McElroy (Audible daily deal, 6 hours 29 minutes)
-----The book of the podcast, whose tagline is "a marital tour of misguided medicine." I have listened to this book in its entirety four times now, and have worked my way through the entirety of the podcast's back catalog (~200 hours at the time of this post), so, you know, consider this highly recommended. :D
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21. The Beautiful Brain, by Hana Walker-Brown (Audible free member offer, 3 hours 42 minutes)
-----A documentary about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which uses Jeff Astle (a beloved English soccer player) as its starting point and continues through a lot of science, some politics and law, and a chilling digression into battered wife syndrome. Walker-Brown hits a nice balance between emotions and science.
22. English in America: A Linguistic History, by Natalie Schilling (Great Courses, 5 hours 55 minutes)
-----Pretty meh, to be honest.
23. Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills, by Steven Novella (Great Courses, 12 hours 39 minutes)
-----This one was cool and I enjoyed it. :)
24. Bach and the High Baroque, by Robert Greenberg (Great Courses, 25 hours 5 minutes)
-----A lot of music, and a lot of talking about music. Greenberg is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about his subject, though his grasp of non-music history is very... 9th grade US public high school, circa the 1970s, shall we say. But the music is lovely (well, it's Bach; what else was it going to be?) and it's cool to get a better sense of where he fits in the development of European/Western musical traditions.
25. The Other 1492: Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Making of an Empire, by Teofilo F. Ruiz (Great Courses, 6 hours 15 minutes)
-----Basically all the OTHER stuff going on in the Iberian peninsula in 1492, such as the fall of Granada, the Edict of Expulsion, and so on, with a bunch of historical background first so those events make sense, followed by some reflection on their effects. Very interesting.
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26. The Fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 12 hours 33 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. Informative and entertaining.
27. The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality, by Don Lincoln (Great Courses, 12 hours 21 minutes)
-----Science!!! Would have been slightly improved with visuals of a few math equations, but 99% of this is perfectly clear in an audio-only format. (...though I may just be saying that since I did take some college-level chemistry back in the day, which included a bunch of quantum stuff and matrix math.)
28. The Persian Empire, by John W. Lee (Great Courses, 11 hours 59 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. Interesting and informative.
29. The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146BC, by Adrian Goldsworthy, read by Derek Perkins (Audible daily deal, 16 hours 26 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. I enjoyed this... and then promptly went and read all the extant Hannibal/Scipio fic on AO3, because apparently that is the kind of person I am. *wry*
30. Herodotus: The Father of History, by Elizabeth Vandiver (Great Courses, 12 hours 17 minutes)
-----A discussion of Herodotus's influences and the methods he used in crafting his only known/surviving work, which "looked at the past in new and fresh ways, seeing it not as a distant recess shrouded in legend and rumor, but as something that lies close at hand; as something that immediately affects the here and now, and as a subject whose great personalities and patterns of events can be studied in order to make the reasons behind them as clear as possible." Prof. Vandiver is great at conveying both information and enthusiasm. You should totally listen to this. :)
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31. The Ottoman Empire, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 18 hours 44 minutes)
-----A history of the Ottoman Empire from its beginnings (actually, from before its beginnings, because context is important!) to the establishment of the modern Turkish republic.
32. A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs, by Ben Garrod (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 42 minutes)
-----An overview of the current scientific understanding of dinosaurs. Fun! I mean, who doesn't like dinosaurs???
33. It Burns, by Marc Fennell (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 52 minutes)
-----An investigation into the world of competitive chili-pepper breeding, and the culture of competitive chili-eating and YouTube chili-eating videos, loosely framed by Fennell's own troubled relationship with food and bodily control issues. I think the through-line is a bit forced, but the information is fascinating.
34. The Ends of the World, by Peter Brannen, read by Adam Verner (Audible daily deal, 9 hours 57 minutes)
-----The five major mass extinctions in earth's history, and their relationship to the mass extinction that's slowly gathering speed in our own time. Fascinating, depressing, and hopeful by turns. Definitely worth a listen (or a read, depending on your preference).
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You know, looking at it all together, that is a lot of hours. What's especially interesting is that they're all hours I also fill with other tasks, because I literally cannot focus on audio-only input without something else to eat fidgety overflow. So I listen while driving, or while walking into work, or while cooking, or while doing laundry, or while raking leaves, or any number of random tasks. All of which are things I would be doing anyway, but adding the audio input makes those tasks less annoying because I no longer feel like "ugh, folding laundry is such a waste of time" since I am now Learning A Thing while doing a mindless chore.
Apparently the theme of 2019 for me is that this is the year I finally learned how to listen to audiobooks (and/or podcasts) and it improved my life in ways I was absolutely not expecting.
...Also, you have probably noticed that there is no fiction on this list. There's a reason for that, and it's that I am super-picky about narrative voice for fiction and also I get SO IMPATIENT at the pacing when I can't just read ahead at my own speed. I'm picky about nonfiction narrative voice, too, but less so. And lecture series are perfect because they're not a person reading written prose -- they're just a person talking like a normal human being. Like, okay, they're talking from notes about a specific subject, but it's basically a college lecture recorded on tape, and I'm cool with a wide variety of professorial styles, so. *wry*
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
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Anyway, the list:
---------------
---------------
1. The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World, by Robert Garland (Great Courses, 24 hours 28 minutes)
-----Or more accurately, in the ancient Mediterranean world (Egypt, Greece, Rome, with a few digressions into Mesopotamia and Persia) and in medieval England. Garland's unexamined ethnocentrism grates after a while, but there's a bunch of useful information in here. (Just ignore most of what he says once he gets to the medieval period, particularly about the Vikings.)
2. Jingle Bell Pop, by John Seabrook (Audible free member offer, 1 hour 14 minutes)
-----A history of how/when/why various songs entered the "canon" of American Christmas music. Slight but entertaining.
3. Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 6 hours)
-----Which should probably be subtitled "maybe let's not skim over Mesopotamia and Anatolia/Persia so fast before diving into Greek history, hey?" This is fairly introductory level stuff, but well organized and interesting. Also, a note about Prof. Harl, since I have been listening to a bunch of his courses: he has a strong Brooklyn (or Brooklyn-adjacent) accent and a kind of strident speaking pattern, which I understand some listeners find off-putting, but which I find oddly endearing because it makes him sound like he's really into whatever he's talking about.
4. The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague, by Dorsey Armstrong (Great Courses, 12 hours 10 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. My one gripe is that Prof. Armstrong treats the course a bit too much like an actual college course where students can go several days between lectures and therefore includes a sort of five-minute "as we discussed in the previous lecture..." catch-up section at the start of each new lecture. This gets old fast if you're listening to a bunch in a row on a long drive. *wry* Other than that, very interesting and informative.
5. Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed, by Edwin Barnhart (Great Courses, 23 hours 15 minutes)
-----Fascinating and informative. You could easily make a whole course (or multiple courses) on any one of the cultures Prof. Barnhart discusses here.
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6. Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Empire, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 18 hours 29 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. I particularly like this one because Prof. Harl doesn't stop at "and then he conquered Persia and died young" the way a lot of world histories do, but actually talks about how Alexander worked to govern Persia, the details of his northeastern conquests and march through the Indus river valley, and so on.
7. Lost Worlds of South America, by Edwin Barnhart (Great Courses, 11 hours 51 minutes)
-----Not as good as Prof. Barnhart's lecture series on Mesoamerica and North America, but still quite interesting. Again, you could do multiple lecture series on any of the cultures he deals with. It continues to annoy me that it's easy to find all kinds of detailed examinations of Euro-centric history and peoples, but like pulling teeth to find non-specialist works on pre-contact American history that get more detailed than general surveys. *sigh*
8. Money Management Skills, by Michael Finke (Great Courses, 6 hours 9 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin.
9. The Addictive Brain, by Thad A. Polk (Great Courses, 6 hours 19 minutes)
-----A study of addiction from a neurobiological perspective. Very interesting.
10. Folsom Untold: The Strange True Story of Johnny Cash's Greatest Album, by Danny Robins (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 21 minutes)
-----Way overdone, did not need to be more than about one hour long, but there are worse ways to kill a couple hours and/or help get myself through a day of chores.
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11. The Story of Human Language, by John McWhorter (Great Courses, 18 hours 15 minutes)
-----Weirdly, I have no memory of the contents of this lecture series? I mean, I'm pretty sure I did listen to it, and I vaguely recall thinking it was all right, but damned if I could tell you a single thing about it. Possibly it just blended together with my other random linguistics-by-osmosis knowledge. (Look, my brother has a masters in linguistics. I picked up a lot of random stuff by proxy.)
12. Rome and the Barbarians, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 18 hours 24 minutes)
-----On the construction of "us" versus the other, and also broadening the focus away from Germans and Gauls/Britons to talk about peoples on ALL borders of the Roman Empire.
13. The Demon Next Door, by Bryan Burrough, read by Steve White (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 45 minutes)
-----True crime story about a serial killer in a moderate-sized Texas town. Annoyingly black-and-white view of morality/personality traits, but I think that's typical for the genre. Also Audible now thinks I am a true crime fan, which is inaccurate.
14. Freakonomics: Revised Edition, by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, read by Stephen J. Dubner (Audible daily deal, 7 hours 51 minutes)
-----My general reaction is something along the lines of "okay then" and a shrug. I suspect this book may be a victim of its own success, in that the authors' points have been spread far enough that they seem like "doesn't everyone already know that?" ideas rather than something new and interesting.
15. How to Grow Anything: Food Gardening for Everyone, by Melinda Myers (Great Courses, 5 hours 59 minutes)
-----This does not work well as an audio-only media experience. I mean, there are still a bunch of useful gardening tips! But there are long sections where Myers is clearly potting a bunch of plants and demonstrating stuff visually that are either boring or straight-up unintelligible without the accompanying visuals.
---------------
16. An Economic History of the World since 1400, by Donald J. Harreld (Great Courses, 24 hours 25 minutes)
-----Decent general introduction to integrated world economic history, but I have taken actual college courses on this subject and done some additional reading for fun, and as a result found 90% of this very "been there, done that." Which is not the course's fault, but there you are.
17. History's Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach, by Gregory S. Aldrete (Great Courses, 12 hours 12 minutes)
-----This one's a little cockeyed since, IIRC, Aldrete is not actually a military historian, and honestly some of these are less... hmmm... the theme is less "blunders" pure and simple and more on how people's ethnocentrism, discomfort with new technology, and general personality conflict stuff can get in the way of sensible assessment and preparation and lead people to shoot themselves in the foot from the tactical level all the way up to grand strategy. Anyway, very interesting though I'd like to hear an actual military historian do a sort of DVD commentary on this, just for kicks.
18. Masters of War: History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers, by Andrew R. Wilson (Great Courses, 12 hours 13 minutes)
-----Should more accurately be titled "a history of military strategic thought from ancient times to today," since that's what it is. It does that job very effectively, and was especially interesting to listen to right after the military blunders lecture series, since there were occasional moments of overlap when Wilson talked about specific battle examples that led to various schools of thought or that showed people attempting to put various strategies into action.
19. Cities of the Ancient World, by Steven L. Tuck (Great Courses, 11 hours 48 minutes)
-----A discussion of various ancient cities in the Mediterranean world (with a brief digression to Mohenjo Daro), starting from the beginning of urban life all the way up to the founding of Constantinople. Prof. Tuck is interested in both the physical layout and logistics of cities, as well as the social organization of the people who live in them. This is a really interesting subject!
20. The Sawbones Book, by Justin McElroy and Dr. Sydnee McElroy (Audible daily deal, 6 hours 29 minutes)
-----The book of the podcast, whose tagline is "a marital tour of misguided medicine." I have listened to this book in its entirety four times now, and have worked my way through the entirety of the podcast's back catalog (~200 hours at the time of this post), so, you know, consider this highly recommended. :D
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21. The Beautiful Brain, by Hana Walker-Brown (Audible free member offer, 3 hours 42 minutes)
-----A documentary about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which uses Jeff Astle (a beloved English soccer player) as its starting point and continues through a lot of science, some politics and law, and a chilling digression into battered wife syndrome. Walker-Brown hits a nice balance between emotions and science.
22. English in America: A Linguistic History, by Natalie Schilling (Great Courses, 5 hours 55 minutes)
-----Pretty meh, to be honest.
23. Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills, by Steven Novella (Great Courses, 12 hours 39 minutes)
-----This one was cool and I enjoyed it. :)
24. Bach and the High Baroque, by Robert Greenberg (Great Courses, 25 hours 5 minutes)
-----A lot of music, and a lot of talking about music. Greenberg is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about his subject, though his grasp of non-music history is very... 9th grade US public high school, circa the 1970s, shall we say. But the music is lovely (well, it's Bach; what else was it going to be?) and it's cool to get a better sense of where he fits in the development of European/Western musical traditions.
25. The Other 1492: Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Making of an Empire, by Teofilo F. Ruiz (Great Courses, 6 hours 15 minutes)
-----Basically all the OTHER stuff going on in the Iberian peninsula in 1492, such as the fall of Granada, the Edict of Expulsion, and so on, with a bunch of historical background first so those events make sense, followed by some reflection on their effects. Very interesting.
---------------
26. The Fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 12 hours 33 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. Informative and entertaining.
27. The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality, by Don Lincoln (Great Courses, 12 hours 21 minutes)
-----Science!!! Would have been slightly improved with visuals of a few math equations, but 99% of this is perfectly clear in an audio-only format. (...though I may just be saying that since I did take some college-level chemistry back in the day, which included a bunch of quantum stuff and matrix math.)
28. The Persian Empire, by John W. Lee (Great Courses, 11 hours 59 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. Interesting and informative.
29. The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146BC, by Adrian Goldsworthy, read by Derek Perkins (Audible daily deal, 16 hours 26 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. I enjoyed this... and then promptly went and read all the extant Hannibal/Scipio fic on AO3, because apparently that is the kind of person I am. *wry*
30. Herodotus: The Father of History, by Elizabeth Vandiver (Great Courses, 12 hours 17 minutes)
-----A discussion of Herodotus's influences and the methods he used in crafting his only known/surviving work, which "looked at the past in new and fresh ways, seeing it not as a distant recess shrouded in legend and rumor, but as something that lies close at hand; as something that immediately affects the here and now, and as a subject whose great personalities and patterns of events can be studied in order to make the reasons behind them as clear as possible." Prof. Vandiver is great at conveying both information and enthusiasm. You should totally listen to this. :)
---------------
31. The Ottoman Empire, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 18 hours 44 minutes)
-----A history of the Ottoman Empire from its beginnings (actually, from before its beginnings, because context is important!) to the establishment of the modern Turkish republic.
32. A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs, by Ben Garrod (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 42 minutes)
-----An overview of the current scientific understanding of dinosaurs. Fun! I mean, who doesn't like dinosaurs???
33. It Burns, by Marc Fennell (Audible free member offer, 2 hours 52 minutes)
-----An investigation into the world of competitive chili-pepper breeding, and the culture of competitive chili-eating and YouTube chili-eating videos, loosely framed by Fennell's own troubled relationship with food and bodily control issues. I think the through-line is a bit forced, but the information is fascinating.
34. The Ends of the World, by Peter Brannen, read by Adam Verner (Audible daily deal, 9 hours 57 minutes)
-----The five major mass extinctions in earth's history, and their relationship to the mass extinction that's slowly gathering speed in our own time. Fascinating, depressing, and hopeful by turns. Definitely worth a listen (or a read, depending on your preference).
---------------
---------------
You know, looking at it all together, that is a lot of hours. What's especially interesting is that they're all hours I also fill with other tasks, because I literally cannot focus on audio-only input without something else to eat fidgety overflow. So I listen while driving, or while walking into work, or while cooking, or while doing laundry, or while raking leaves, or any number of random tasks. All of which are things I would be doing anyway, but adding the audio input makes those tasks less annoying because I no longer feel like "ugh, folding laundry is such a waste of time" since I am now Learning A Thing while doing a mindless chore.
Apparently the theme of 2019 for me is that this is the year I finally learned how to listen to audiobooks (and/or podcasts) and it improved my life in ways I was absolutely not expecting.
...Also, you have probably noticed that there is no fiction on this list. There's a reason for that, and it's that I am super-picky about narrative voice for fiction and also I get SO IMPATIENT at the pacing when I can't just read ahead at my own speed. I'm picky about nonfiction narrative voice, too, but less so. And lecture series are perfect because they're not a person reading written prose -- they're just a person talking like a normal human being. Like, okay, they're talking from notes about a specific subject, but it's basically a college lecture recorded on tape, and I'm cool with a wide variety of professorial styles, so. *wry*
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)