Love
I believe in love, especially when it comes to reading. I’m of the opinion that everyone should read something. Literature, poetry, romance, fluff, kid’s books, comics, cookbooks, finance, cozy mysteries, articles on the stars, sports news, Glamour Magazine, The New York Times, - Hell, the back of a cereal box - whatever flips your switch, just read.
I fall in love with a book or a series on (at the least) a monthly basis and the great thing is that falling for the new never negates or belittles the love I have for the last book (or the other four hundred books) that came before it.
I love books in just about every form - braille being the only exception I can think of at the moment, well braille and manga. I love the traditional book, the eBook, the graphic novel, and even the movie (isn’t just about every movie these days based on a book, graphic novel, comic, or fairy tale?).
But what I really want to talk about today is The Audiobook.
Audiobooks are something of a throwback. Yes I realize they are read-aloud versions of the written word. Still, before we could make movies or before we could print books, we told our stories by actually speaking. For ages our family history, our beliefs, our wisdom that came with the experience of life we passed down through the stories we told each other.
And actually, we still do. We are, I believe, by our very nature storytellers - whether it be our own or that of someone else or one totally made up, we have a compulsion and a need to do it - to tell the story (assuming we're able to find it first).
Part of my current obsession with audiobooks (I'm sure) is that it is so very rare that I find one that really grabs me, hooks me, and makes me fall in love mostly because there are so many more variables involved in loving an audiobook. To start with, you have to love the story, but then you also have to love the reader. On top of that, you also need to love the performance which someone else has directed which means you have to love the pace of the story in conjunction with the reading pace of the performer.
When the voice, and the pacing, and the story really come together and click and work for you it’s a thing of beauty. It’s like when the lyrics, the music, and the performer strike you in exactly the right way, and you get goosebumps down your arms. Suddenly, two senses (hearing and touch) seem to merge.
It is for that feeling that I spend so much time on Audible.com scouring for The Next Book and why it’s still so rare that I find it.
But when I do find it - well, it feels a lot like magic.