Tuesday's reading ... let's mix up
I discovered this great app called audiobooks, which offers podcasts of books in the public domain and decided to try it out. One of the reasons the amount of books I read has gone down so dramatically over the last years is lack of time. A full-time job that thinks an 8h workday is a nice social achievement but doesn't have anything to do with us, plus two rather time consuming RL hobbies and fandom leave very little time left for sitting down with a book to read.
Thus, I decided to give audiobooks a try. I can listen to them while I'm walking the dog, which makes about one and half hour a day of "reading" time.
I started with Moby Dick by Herman Melville. There's an advantage to not being an English native speaker. There all this great classic English books that I've heard of but haven't read, and I'm for the most part unspoiled for.
I did know that Moby Dick was about obsessively chasing this big white whale, but that was about it. Imagine my surprise when three chapters into the book I went like, "Wait a minute, is this a slash story? OMG, it totally is!" I mean it, the Ishmael/Queequeg pours out of that book. It's so obvious I wouldn't even call it subtext.
And Melville has a refreshingly open-minded view of the world that surprised me given how old the book is, especially since the last author I read was H.P. Lovecraft whose approach to the world in the stories I've read so far is something like, "It looks different than your average white male American. It's probably not human! And is sure going to be evil! Be aware!"
So yeah, I'm enjoying Moby Dick and advancing in chunks of 5-6 chapters a day. Also, the voice of the guy who reads the book doesn't hurt either. He could read me the telephone book and I'd be just as fascinated.
This entry was originally posted at http://forestgreen.dreamwidth.org/118794.html, where it has
comments.
Thus, I decided to give audiobooks a try. I can listen to them while I'm walking the dog, which makes about one and half hour a day of "reading" time.
I started with Moby Dick by Herman Melville. There's an advantage to not being an English native speaker. There all this great classic English books that I've heard of but haven't read, and I'm for the most part unspoiled for.
I did know that Moby Dick was about obsessively chasing this big white whale, but that was about it. Imagine my surprise when three chapters into the book I went like, "Wait a minute, is this a slash story? OMG, it totally is!" I mean it, the Ishmael/Queequeg pours out of that book. It's so obvious I wouldn't even call it subtext.
And Melville has a refreshingly open-minded view of the world that surprised me given how old the book is, especially since the last author I read was H.P. Lovecraft whose approach to the world in the stories I've read so far is something like, "It looks different than your average white male American. It's probably not human! And is sure going to be evil! Be aware!"
So yeah, I'm enjoying Moby Dick and advancing in chunks of 5-6 chapters a day. Also, the voice of the guy who reads the book doesn't hurt either. He could read me the telephone book and I'd be just as fascinated.
This entry was originally posted at http://forestgreen.dreamwidth.org/118794.html, where it has
comments.