Story Time

I must admit.

As I've gotten older, I've read fewer and fewer books. Now, I read only a few a year. Reading, as I've come to see it, is a horribly inefficient activity. If my eyes are busy, I really can't get much done with the rest of my senses (excepting taste). Besides, you see stories through your mind's eye anyway, your externals add nothing.

Despite feeling this way, I probably gotten through just as many books, if not more, than anyone else. According to my iTunes, I've listened to 40 days of audiobooks in just the past few years. Audiobooks take up one of my lesser senses, my ears, leaving me free to do 40 days worth of other activities. I probably made the switch back when I would spend hours building LEGOs while listening to cassette tapes. I listen while doing chores, when walking, when biking, when modeling, and pretty much any other moment I have to myself.

One result of listening to books rather than reading them is that I listen almost exclusively to fiction. Audio provides voices for my mind to remember and connect to characters so it is only natural that they improve stories more than something like a textbook. It's sometimes odd when you hear these narrators pop up in other stories but the feeling goes away after the story grows on you.

A few of the greats.

It turns out that my favorite stories are actually series. Strangely enough, the first two series I actually read before I listened to them. Those two had particularly notable narrators who I think made them even better than they already were. I've reread a few of them, though I badly want to read all of them again. I have to force myself to wait so that they are just as good the next time around. Here are my favorites.

    1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Clearly the best book ever written, the version I listened was read by the author, Douglas Adams, completing the British humor package. It's the kind of book that manages to pull together one of the most mind boggling twisty plots by means of "making stuff up until it works". Authors often talk about how readers might read their books differently than they intend, but when the author reads it to you, you get all the emotions they meant it to have. It's the difference between a script and a play. Visually speaking, there are enough aliens, planets, ships, and robots to come up with a new image for each page.

    2. Abhorsen Trilogy - This series is also set in England, giving it a bit of that British feel, though it's not a comedy. I listened to it narrated by Tim Curry, one of the most recognizable voices out there. The books focus on a different kind of hero, a sort of reverse-necromancer that brings the dead back into death via a set of bells while double-reverse necromancers (ie. necromancers) bring them back up. It integrates a healthy amount of reality into its fantasy and chooses female leads (also a rather fresh addition it seems). The imagery of the books is very unique, from the libraries and viewing rooms of the Claire in their glacier to the fogs rolling past the academy where the military has holed up as the dead approach to the Abhorsen's house in the middle of a river perched above a massive waterfall.

    3. Ender's Game series - This series is a bit like Artemis Fowl but the genius feels even more rewarding. The first book follows a young boy genius, Ender, who is abducted, trained, and abused to make him ready to save the Earth from the buggers. The later books further examine his psyche as he, in exile, tries to make right everything he blames himself for. The plots are very cleverly written and the characters feel real. It even invents a space-age sport before systematically showing how to beat it. The settings are reasonable rather than outlandish (a habit of sci-fi books). More than any other book I've read, it goes to great efforts to describe exactly how its seemingly magic technologies work.

    4. His Dark Materials - Probably better known by its first book, the Golden Compass, this series had a really good plot and a world that made me want to live in it. It includes its own ideas about life and the afterlife as well as daemons, basically a physical embodiment of the soul in the form of an animal that goes everywhere with you. They're basically super pets. I can tell by the deteriorating state of facts in my head regarding the exact plot that it is almost time to read the series again, something I'm looking forward to as of now. I would have to agree with the cover of the movie that Iorek Byrnison in his armor (he's a massive polar bear) is one of the most memorable images of the book.

So long and thanks for all the fish.