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On occasion, people tell me that they think listening to an audiobook is cheating.
Cheating on physical books?
It isnt a competition.
Sometimes you want to read a book, and sometimes you want to listen to a book.
One of the great things about reading is you cant do anything else while youre reading.
(Which is a great audiobook, by the way.)
Ive also found, over the years, that some books make satisfying listens and some just dont.
Sometimes you have a terrible narrator.
Sometimes you have a complicated and terrible book.
Novels that jump around in time and from character to character can be challenging to follow as audiobooks.
That stuff can be easier to see spatially on the page.
But the best audiobooks are experiences to themselves.
I might have found Matt Haigs recent best-selling novelThe Midnight Librarya little bit treacly if Id read it.
The audiobook category is expanding every day, and I certainly cant listen to everything.
Its hard not to lose yourself in them theyre atmospheric with an energetic story drive.
Mercedestrilogy, read byWill Patton, is pretty spectacular.
I really savored every last drop of this, thanks, in part, to Numrichs intense narration.
(He was in AMCsTurnandWar Horseon Broadway.)
It also helps that the book is essentially a monologue told from the perspective of a teenage robot.
Sius voices could be a little more distinct, and I might have preferred some stunt casting here.
(Paging Carey Mulligan.)
One other nitpick: Ishiguro names the humanlike machines in this book Artificial Friends.
This abbreviates to AF.
References to Lydia Davis and Renata Adler.
Wicked and ambitious female Ripley-like characters.
(Okay, while trying to make a dent in a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.)
Straightforward but twisty and slyly read by Plummer, an audio pro, its a really fun ride.
One of the reasons I listen to so many audiobooks is that I have trouble with boundaries.
Headphones provide a shield from the outside world.
People are always asking me for things, and I have a hard time saying no.
To that end, Im always looking to figure out how to make my boundaries less porous.
Tawwab actually has some good, succinct advice, which she offers with a pleasant Southern twirl.
Stop following people who look like they have everything together on social media.
A holdover from February … Its about an actor like Ethan Hawke performing as Hotspur in a Broadway production ofHenry IV.
Hawke actually did this in 2003, opposite Kevin Kline as Falstaff and Audra McDonald as Lady Percy.
(Uma Thurman filed for divorce from Hawke in 2004.)
So, theres a guessing-game, blind-item, whats-the-juice quality to the proceedings.
(Did Audra hit on him?
Is Hawke talking about Andre Balazs?)
