and this is where it gets intensely cool

[rotynd]

You know what’s good? Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter is good.

Oh my god. You guys. MINE MINE MINE FINALLY. I can’t even tell you; I grew up listening to The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton over and over and over again at bedtime, so a kindly British gentleman’s voice reading stories for children does things to me on a sublime level, it’s

Comments

Re: Stephen Freakin' Fry

[rotynd]

We were only allowed one movie a week when we were little, and Mama didn't work then so she had the time to indulge us, so reading was like seriously the entirety of our entertainment. And since I read late... yeah, it was all Mum. She busier by the time she got to Mimi, and pretty much couldn't do it with Fran, and by the time Fran came around and Mimi was little, the movie-watching went way up (one per kid per week, then... whatever, just please god let me get something done), and while it could be coincidence, there is an uncanny corollary to how much we like reading. (It is a way of life for me, Em loves it inasmuch as she expresses love for anything anymore, Mimi is pretty into it with the right book but finds it a bit of a chore, and Fran pretty much hates it.) But this is way off topic now, whatever.

Yeah... I don't know. Pretty can't be all there is either. Maybe if you're only listening you feel like you should be able to do something else, and then attention just goes SMACK DOWN. Maybe the only reason I can still do it is that I only ever do it at night, when I'm not doing anything else on purpose due to trying to sleep.

Re: Stephen Freakin' Fry

[sobdasha]

Hah, maybe there is something to that. I love to read but I always read the same books over and over again. So I still read a series 20+ times (someone once asked me what the point of buying books was, and implied that you didn't read them more than once, and I was WAIT WHAT. ARE YOU SERIOUS. WHAT.), and I say I love reading, but I hate the library. Just a bunch of titles lined up and how the hell do I know what I want to read? Mom said you just pull a random book off the shelf and read the back and decide but NO THAT'S TOO DIFFICULT NO I HAVE BOOKS AT HOME OKAY.
Mom found that very frustrating. I did eventually randomly happen upon Diana Wynne Jones, which was excellent. But, yeah. I don't go find new books. GOOD BOOKS SHOULD JUST COME TO ME.

I am a person who loves reading for none of the right reasons, just like I want to be a writer but I am the antithesis of every reason people are motivated to write.

I've never been able to do that kind of stuff, like listening to music to go to bed. Do you just leave it on all night? Do you have a timer for when it shuts itself off? For someone like me who takes like an hour to fall asleep, how stressed will I be when I set it for a long time and then it goes off and I'M STILL NOT ASLEEP. Plus what is the point if it isn't something I WANT to listen to, and if I want to listen to it I'm not going to be falling asleep.

Someone makes life too difficult.

Re: Stephen Freakin' Fry

[rotynd]

OMG I DO NOT UNDERSTAND READING SOMETHING ONCE. I mean not a good thing. If a book's worth reading, it's worth reading several times. So, sure, there are plenty of books that you do just want to go through once - that's what the library's for, over in my camp - but if a book is actually good then of course you have to read it more than once. Because you'll get something more/different out of it each time. GOSH. I don't think re-reading is a sign of reading for the wrong reasons; quite the opposite...

Ah, well, see, I take quite a while to get to sleep as it is, and no, listening to stuff emphatically does NOT help me get there. BUT when I was little Mama assumed that it did, so, as previously mentioned, I would listen to The Castle of Adventure. I thought this was fabulous, like being told to go to bed "but hey, you get to stay up and read really!" Mama thought it was lulling me to sleep. Everyone was happy. And then I got older and it was Old Time Radio - Gunsmoke and Johnny Dollar and Suspense and Radio Mystery Theater. SO THE THING IS, listening to things doesn't help me sleep, but I am USED to it. And especially with HP, which I've read through several times, and which I can rewind whenever I want... I just leave it on, let it play, and accept that I'm going to fall asleep in the middle of a chapter and have to figure out where I left off.

This has highlighted some splotchiness in my sleeping patterns, as it turns out I'll remember five-second patches of it all the way through a chapter I thought I'd slept through, but whatevs, man, it's all Stephen Fry.