Audio Books

Due to the happy arrival of 2 grandbabies, I find myself on the road a lot: 1 hour (with luck) to visit baby Hannah, now 20 months old; and 7 hours (including pit stops) to visit baby Leo, now 18 months old.  Unless there’s terrible traffic, with the radio for company and the beautiful scenery outside my window, the 1 hour trip goes by in a flash; but the 7 hour trip can seem interminable:  the radio comes and goes, about half of the drive is exceedingly ugly, and there’s always traffic. 

I’d been urged to listen to Books on Tape for a very long time – back when they really were on tape! – and I tried it once.  On a 6 hour drive from Washington DC to New York City, I listened to I CLAUDIUS.   

And I hated it.

I took this trip often and I would gage my progress more by the time that passed than by the landscape:  three hours; half way there!

But while I CLAUDIUS, may have taken 6 hours of listening, it felt as though centuries had passed, with emperors coming and going, with innumerable battles won and lost, and with an astonishing number of poisonings and murder. As I’ve never been one to stop something I’ve started – I never walk out of the theater during a bad play, concert, film; never leave a book unfinished – I continued to pass the centuries with Claudius.

And vowed never to listen to a book on tape again.

But:  7 hours?  And annoying traffic despite being on a 12-lane highway?  And huge stretches of ugly shopping centers, one right after another?

With the advent of Audible.com where you can easily download an entire book onto your mobile phone and never have to change a tape or CD, I decided to try again.

And I love it!

For one, I don’t feel as though I’m wasting my time during these 7 hours. And as I’ve learned to choose my books more wisely – to only listen to stories that stick to one lifetime; and to choose my Reader carefully – I find that listening to books makes the time go by quickly.  I confess that some [very few] times, I’ve even stayed in my car after I’d reached my destination, just so that I might pause the book at a more opportune moment.  (Don’t tell Leo!) 

The act of listening to a book instead of reading one is a completely different experience.  In a very real way, an audio book is a continuation of an oral tradition that is the beginning of all literature.  And for most of us, having stories read to us is one of the first ways in which we become familiar with language; it can bring you back to that happy time when books were read aloud, especially for you.  It’s also a way to preserve the sound of language as spoken today.  Wouldn’t it be grand if we could know how words sounded in Shakespeare’s day instead of making a guess at it?

Of course, when you listen to a book, its Reader makes choices for you that you might not yourself have made – for better or worse.  You also can’t catch all the nuances of language and style, as you can’t slow down the pace or re-read passages you particularly like or that need clarification.  I tried a few times to “bookmark” a particular page I liked, or to replay a passage or two that I found unclear, but that didn’t seem to help.  Besides, if the “medium is the message” then each one requires a different approach, and with audio books, it seems best to just let the words wash over you, to get into the mood and not into the details.

And this is why you must choose your book and Reader carefully.

A book I love but hadn’t read in a long time is William Faulkner’s LIGHT IN AUGUST, so I decided to listen to it.  This proved a poor choice, as the book includes lots of southern and other dialects and has a plot that goes forward and backward in time, both of which require a lot of concentration. So although the book had an excellent Reader, I found it difficult to grasp or appreciate enough of the novel while also paying attention to my driving.

Summerset Maugham’s OF HUMAN BONDAGE failed because the Reader (male), tried to approximate the voices of the women – which is not at all necessary! -- by giving them squeaking voices and mincing manners.  I hated the story, the characters, the entire experience:  and it was the Reader’s fault.  I will avoid him in future.

But I thoroughly enjoyed the historical novels of Hilary Mantel – WOLF HALL and BRING UP THE BODIES – as it brought to life Tudor England as told through the eyes of one of its major players, Thomas Cromwell.  They are quite detailed novels, but I already “knew” most of the major characters so that made it easy to follow.  I’m looking forward to the next volume in this series.

Of late, I’ve also listened to “celebrity” Readers – Colin Firth reading Graham Greene’s THE  END  OF  THE  AFFAIR (swoon!); and Jeremy Irons reading Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA.

Irons’ reading of LOLITA is a revelation; it is laugh-out-loud funny; it is poignant; it is tragic; it is beautiful.  His Humbert is clueless at the same time that he is defensive; he is pleased with himself at the same time that he is angry and embarrassed.  Beautiful language is used to tell a tragic and comic tale, and Irons manages this to perfection.  There are lots of descriptive “lists” in this book – of landscapes, of types of people, of the American systems of education, of law, of love, of passion – and they are as acutely read as they were written. Perhaps they’re even better, as in Irons' reading of them, they don’t feel like mere lists but are melodious and funny….  Listening to Irons makes the novel resonate and reminds us of its brilliance.

But one of the main problems with audio books -- no matter how wonderful! -- and why reading a book is usually better than listening to it, is that in the audio book, the Reader can replace the character as written.  Irons completely replaces Humbert.  Forever.  Despite Nabokov's physical and mental description of Humbert, I will no longer be able to imagine him for myself.  (I can’t even picture James Mason as Humbert any more!)  For me, Maurice Bendrix is Colin Firth; Humbert Humbert is Jeremy Irons – and not the other way around -- frozen that way forever:  goodbye imagination.

I’ll never listen to a “celebrity” Reader again; I’ll never listen to anyone I can “picture.” **

And no matter the Reader, as most of the books we listen to were written to be read, that's probably the best approach to the material, the best approach to this particular medium.  When you're doing the reading, the writer's words won’t just wash over you, but you’re free to slow down, to stop, to re-read, and to savor each and every one of them.  And when you're doing the reading, you collaborate with the writer in creating the characters, the settings, the emotions, the emphasis.  This is, of course, what the Readers of these audio books have done; but when you read rather than listen, you get to do it yourself: the story, the characters, the setting – the book is yours!

Still, I won’t stop listening.  (After all, 7 hours!)  But I only listen in the car, never at home:  home is reading space.

But when in the middle of a good listen, I can choose to go to the grocery store that’s 6 miles away rather than the one that’s just across the street.

What’s wrong with that? 

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** Note:  My son-in-law, Robert Shapiro, is a [wonderful] reader for Random House and others.  You can download his books; and as you don’t know what he looks like, you can use your imagination to picture anyone you want when you listen!

The End of a Chapter

When I read a book I always take note of how many pages there are in the chapter I’m beginning and bookmark its last page.  I don’t know exactly why I do that; but as I rarely put a book down in the middle of a chapter, perhaps it’s that I like to know what I’m in for!  

A 3-page chapter? 5 pages? 40?  I can read several chapters like that at a sitting.   

140 pages? I think I’ll wait until morning….

As I read, I sometimes look ahead to see how many pages are left in the chapter and feel a sense of accomplishment when I reach it, as if it were a job well done.   Then I can close my book with satisfaction and move on to my next activity.

Of course, the best chapters don’t always cooperate.  They're the ones that raise questions that make one especially eager to start the next chapter.  In such cases I know that I won’t be able to sleep – or do anything else! – so I stay up and read the following chapter, however long it is, until I’ve finished it.  And so on and on….  As you can imagine, this results in many, many late nights for me!

In my recent post on The Willing Suspension of Disbelief, I wrote that I’d had an accident that resulted in a break to my left wrist.  After surgery and months of physical therapy I felt better;  I was back in the Berkshires and ready to reopen my book store for the summer season.

But that was not to be….

I had another accident that was far more serious than merely breaking my wrist (although I did that, too!).

So:  another surgery and more physical therapy…and my store remained closed.

During that time it occurred to me that perhaps this accident signaled “the end of a chapter” for me – I guess I'd missed that first signal back in June! – and I’ve decided to close my store.

This coming spring and summer I'm going to have a big sale of all the things in my store – books, artwork, library antiques, art, furniture.  Everything!  Watch for it.

The years at Farshaw’s have been happy ones for me, so it’s not without some sadness that I leave it now.  But the end of a chapter also signals the beginning of the next, and I'm looking forward to that. I don’t know exactly what my next chapter will be, but I have lots of ideas and am very excited about the new adventures -- the new chapters! -- that are ahead.  Stay tuned.

And until next time, I wish all of you very happy [bedtime] reading, however you choose to do it! 

Guest Post: Reading "Rules"

Everywhere one looks, it seems that bookstores are closing or becoming cafés, or that they are selling things other than books:  book things, but not books themselves.    There is a constant lament from booksellers, publishers, writers and the media about the death of the book, the end of reading.  These lamenters tell us we prefer video and film and interactive games and books on tape to actually reading silently to ourselves.

Most recently, this sentiment was expressed on the cover of the NEW YORKER – one of several they’ve published in recent years heralding the end of book selling, book reading, and book buying as we know it.  (Not funny!)
 

But if you were to spend a little time “surfing” the web, you would be forgiven for thinking that the naysayers are not paying sufficient attention.  There are thousands of books sites on the web.  Practically anyone who reads puts up a blog about their book likes and dislikes; there are book review sites in which books are reviewed by committee; there are book discussion sites; book club sites; book seller sites; book author sites; “modern” book sites; “classic” book sites; science-fiction book sites; mystery book sites; chick-lit book sites; book-a-day sites; library sites; and even book sites which review other book sites!

It is daunting.

I said in my very first post, What I'm Planning More or Less..., that I am a very slow reader, and that I couldn’t possibly read all that there is to read, let alone all that I want to read!  Even dipping into these book sites takes more time than I can comfortably manage!

But help has come my way….

Since 1985, Judy Pollock – a close friend of mine for more years than I care to mention! – has been president of Language at Work,  a communication skills training company.  Judy has been a reading teacher, a professional actor, and a public speaker; and she has designed many courses that help others communicate more easily and confidently.  Her clients range from private individuals to businesses and government agencies.

But Judy has had a “hands-off” policy when it came to her friends, and it is only since I began this blog and have been whining to her about my slow reading that she has finally come to my rescue.  While I can’t say that I am now a speed-reader, I can say that I read much faster than I did only a few months ago.

I am posting here one of the things she sent me that I found helpful; I hope it helps those other slow readers out there, as well as those who want to supplement their reading skills.  If you have questions about her post or other communication concerns, you can email Judy directly; or check out her web blog to see what else she has to offer.

Happy reading!

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Reading “Rules”

Reading is wonderful, but not for everyone. What I frequently hear is, “How I can get through all the things there are to read?  I’m such a slow reader.”  Or worse: “I don’t have time to read fiction.” 

Slow readers can learn to read faster, and all readers can improve their skills. Contrary to what we’d like to think, efficient reading requires some work, and most of the strategies are appropriate for non-fiction.  But, if you can step up your non-fiction speed, you’ll have more time for luxuriating in your fiction!

Here are some things to try:

1.  Silence the voice that says you have to finish reading anything you start.  I give books 100 pages to convince me.  If you’re slogging through books you don’t like, no wonder you don’t have time to read anything else.  And how can you be excited about starting a new book if it means a mandatory sentence of 300+ pages! 

2.  Don’t think you have to read every article in the magazine.   Look for articles that you might want to read.  Tear them out; throw the rest of the magazine away.

3.  Don’t read every article in the same way.  Some will yield their treasures to you with a quick skim.

4.  Identify your reading places: watching TV, in bed, by the phone, in the kitchen.  Here is where you should stash potential reading material. 

Match the material to the place: some things you will skim quickly; some you want to read carefully; some you just need to review; some you want to curl up and read for enjoyment; some you have to work at.  

Now you have a stack of quickies by the phone to whip through while you’re on hold.  You have magazines for previewing in your TV watching chair. Your current book is by your bed, and the latest gobbledy-gook about your health insurance is on your desk where you will presumably be clear-headed and sitting up straight.

5. Preview everything you can.  Look at the title, subheadings, captions, side-bars, table of contents, index.  Many of us begin reading by starting at the first word and plodding along until we either forget what we’re reading or get to the end.  If you take the time to preview your document, you will actually SAVE time because: 

You may decide not to read it; 

If you do decide to read it, the previewing will make the reading easier, and your comprehension and retention will be greater.

6.  Try skimming as an alternative to a thorough reading:

Read the first few paragraphs.  Often the first paragraph or two will contain a little story meant to whet your appetite; skip quickly through the little story.

Read the last few paragraphs if they’re short; just the last one, if not.

Read the first sentence of each paragraph. And maybe the last sentence.

While your eyes are skimming down the page, be alert to any Stand Out words.  These are words that relate to the subject.  They can give you clues about the general idea, or even specifics.

 7.  While you’re reading, pay attention to the structure.   To untangle long sentences, look for Agent, Action, and, if offered, Object.  Who did what to what?  Try this sentence:

The tired farmer, although a mainstay of the economy, a model of persistence and tenacity, and a symbol of hope to those who espouse a simpler lifestyle, today, in spite of his dogged efforts, faces some difficult choices.

Many a valiant reader would be tired herself about halfway through this thicket.  If you see a hard road ahead, latch onto the agent. In this sentence that would be the farmer.  Now skim across the word weeds until you spot a nice action for him:  Aha! “faces”….and, helpfully right next to it, the object. 

This seeking of the Agent, Action, Object activity will help power you through long passages, and if you feel later that you missed something, it won’t be hard to go back and find the missing pieces.

8.  Look for key words that direct the traffic for you.  Read along in whatever direction you and the writer are going, but look out for signal changes. Words such as but, however, finally, therefore, also, indicate a change in direction.  When you get better at this, you can mutter little summaries to yourself as you go – great for comprehension and retention.

9.  The speed-obsessed usually want to know how they can increase reading time.  One drill is to practice on easy material, reading at your normal pace for 2-3 minutes, then at a reallyfastpace for 2-3 minutes.  Repeat for a while. Eventually your reallyfastpace becomes your normal pace.

10.  Finally, when you finish reading, recite a review of what you read.  The first few times you try this you might be horrified to realize that you are not able to summarize your reading, or even – gasp! – to say what the main idea was.  Carry on.  With practice, you’ll get better.  With more practice, this will become automatic (well, easier).  And – not surprisingly, your comprehension and retention will improve because you’ll be in the habit of reading for that little test.

Above all, reading should be fun.  If you employ improvement strategies in your non-fiction reading, you should be able to gain some fiction-reading time.  

And that rules!

What Makes a Good Personal Library?

It’s quite difficult to answer the question of what makes a good personal library. 

For some, it’s a collection of books on one subject of special interest to the owner:  Golf, Dance, Art, Science, Fiction.

For others, it’s one made up of rare books, coveted books, valuable books.

For still others it’s fine and beautiful bindings, regardless of the subject.

For me, it’s anything I’ve enjoyed reading and hope to dip back into again.

And other than books, what else makes a personal library?  Furniture, bookends, artwork, beautiful or interesting objects that are meaningful to the library’s owner.

My personal libraries – and I have two – are primarily made up of some of the duplicates from my bookstore, and of books that I love – important or not; and it encompasses a wide range of subjects. 

I have separate copies of some of the same books in my two libraries, as I can’t bear to be apart from them when I’m in my other home.  I don’t necessarily need to re-read all of these books, but just passing by and seeing them on my bookshelves gives me pleasure; and sometimes, a flash back to a memory from my past.

One such is a book from my childhood which disappeared but which I recently managed to find in a dusty old bookshop.  It cost pennies when I was a child, but it cost me a great deal to purchase it today.  And in re-reading it now, I can see why my mother chose to buy it for me when I was a young girl.

BEHOLD, YOUR QUEEN is the [quite embroidered] story of the Biblical Queen Esther. It's a “fairy tale” romance that little girls can love, and which makes Cinderella pale by comparison.  But Esther is not just depicted here as the penniless, beautiful maiden carried away by the handsome prince; she’s depicted as something of an “action figure," a powerful person in her own right, and one who never lets fear stand in her way as she almost single-handedly saves her people. 

(Perhaps Esther is the precursor to STAR WARS’ Princess Leah?  Or the inspiration for her?  If so, then creator George Lucas certainly knew this story well!)

Another pleasure of mine is enjoying so-called “quality” paperbacks.  (I presume they mean good quality…?)   They are larger than the paperbacks you find at the drugstore, (often equivalent in size to the hard cover) and are made of better paper - strongly glued and sometimes even sewn - and with clear, attractive type.  I have lots of these.  Even when I own the hardcover, I sometimes have one of these paperbacks along side it.  Why?  I don’t know why;  I just like them! 

Mine are very eclectic libraries, indeed!

But as I keep saying, books alone don’t make the library.  It’s also the artwork and the bookcases, and the rugs, and the furniture, and the like. 

I’ve moved a lot, and I’ve carried my books with me from place to place, from state to state, from house to house.  Depending on the other features of my library, the same books have a different feeling of importance or playfulness or both.

Here are some photos of a few of the libraries I’ve had through the years, including ones from the previous carnation of my store.  If you look carefully, you’ll see that many of the books, furniture and objects are the same, but the “feel” is totally different from library to library:  “serious,” relaxed, ornate, modern.

I design libraries for people, and I love to play with the settings.  Buying the necessary, the wanted books is easy; making the space one in which the owner would be happy to spend time – one which represents the “who” that the owner is or would like to be – is more challenging.   And more fun. 

Here is a link to an article in the FINANCIAL TIMES that shows the libraries belonging to several authors:  not just the books, but the book cases and other appurtenances in their libraries.  Without reading a word written by any of these authors, you might decide which of them writes books you might want to read, and which of them does not.  You might be wrong, but it’s not a bad place to begin, as a personal library can reveal one's soul.  

What kind of library do you have? 

What kind of library do you want?

Guest Post: Bookshop Movies

This is a “guest” post by my friend and fellow bookstore owner, Pamela Grath.  Her store is in Michigan, but her blog, Books in Northport, is linked from my Books Blog under “Blogs I Follow.”

 

Back in 1996, Pamela came to our bibliofind.com site, and I had the pleasure of helping her join and learn the ropes.  She and I have never met, but obviously, we enjoy many of the same things – including our April Fools' Day birthdays! – and we have remained in contact over the years.

You will see when you go to her blog that Pamela is an enthusiast – about books, about animals, about nature, and about her part of the world – and her photographs are often so stunning that you want to get on a plane and go there immediately! For now, though, we’ll have to content ourselves with her blog.

But the best description of Pamela is the one she uses to describe herself on her blog:

Blogger, bookseller, philosopher, photographer, writer. Negligent but devoted gardener.  Good cook when inspired. No kind of housekeeper at all.

Here, without further ado, is Pamela’s post.  Enjoy!

Bookshop Movies

Harold groaned when she told him to read everything again. He thought he’d be bored out of his mind, going back and reading the same books he’d already finished. He was stunned to find that the second time through they were different books. He noticed entirely different points and arguments. Sentences he had highlighted seemed utterly pointless now, whereas sentences he had earlier ignored seemed crucial. The marginalia he had written to himself now seemed embarrassingly simpleminded. Either he or the books had changed. 

– David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement

I maintain that the same is true of movies, that you can never watch the "same" movie twice, an assertion that shocked the Philosophy and Film instructor whose teaching assistant I was one semester. In our house, David and I are re-watchers as well as re-readers. The other evening we re-watched a wonderfully witty Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts movie, “Notting Hill.” The number of great almost-throwaway lines in the script had us hooting aloud. 



The bookstore [someone's big chance: the real bookstore is now for sale] doesn’t play a huge role in “Notting Hill,” but naturally it’s part of the attraction of the movie for a bookseller, and that got me to thinking about other films with bookstore settings. The one that leaps to mind first is the obvious, the popular “You’ve Got Mail.” With Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, who can resist? And the movie has a happy ending, too, with the out-of-business bookstore owner turning children’s book author--probably not the fate of many bookstore proprietors who have gone out of business. Please note that “The Shop Around the Corner,” starring Jimmy Stewart, the film that inspired “You’ve Got Mail,” was set in a leather goods store, not a bookstore. Whole different kettle of fish, from a bookseller’s perspective. How's the market for leather goods these days?

The movie version of “84 Charing Cross,” definitely a bookshop story, was nowhere near as good as the book, but I’m sure it’s hard to make a movie out of years of mail correspondence, with no face-to-face encounters and no action, nothing but the requesting and receiving of books mailed across the Atlantic. Perhaps it ought not to have been attempted. 



The Amy Irving character in “Crossing Delancy” works in a bookstore, and, as the organizer of author events, she enjoys the touch of literary glamour on the fringes of her job. The focus of the movie, however, is her search for Mr. Right; as in “Notting Hill,” the bookstore in “Crossing Delancy” is not the main setting of the movie. On the other hand, it’s more than just a brief scene.... Scene? Seen? (Synapses fire, and the mind leaps.) Have you seen “The Answer Man” with Jeff Daniels? Now there’s a film that covers all the bases, from a writer’s life and secrets and his agent’s agonies through the vicissitudes of publishing to the struggles of retail bookselling. I found it riveting and hilarious. 



Poking around, I have come up with a couple of movies I never heard of before featuring bookstore themes. Anyone know anything about “The Bookstore” or “Heaven’s Bookstore”? Both are foreign films, the latter Japanese, neither listed on Netflix. I’ve added “The Love Letter” and “Read You Like a Book” to my queue. Will I be disappointed? 



Here’s what’s really on my mind: What I'm dying to see are film versions of Christopher Morley’s two classic novels about the bookselling life, Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop. “Could they be updated to a modern setting?” David asked. No, no, a thousand times no! They are period pieces! They are, as I said, classics, iconic works for American booksellers, especially those of us who sell used books and grew up on the Morley dreams. Roger Mifflin must drive the countryside from farm to farm in his horse-drawn gypsy-style wagon in the first story, and the second absolutely must be set in the World War I era. Anything else would be heresy. Please, someone make these movies--but for God’s sake don’t screw them up! 



The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, which ran from 1948 to 1955, apparently presented "Parnassus on Wheels" in 1951. I wonder if it was any good. Why has no one since produced film versions of these stories of the eccentric bookseller from Brooklyn? As printed books become objects of nostalgia, surely the time is ripe, and America is ready, for a movie that would dwell lovingly on this important part of our cultural heritage? 



Postscript: If you don't know Christopher Morley, introduce him to yourself with this short essay on the thrill of visiting bookshops with an explorer's attitude of discovery, and you'll see why we booksellers with open shops continue to adore this writer as the world whirls by our doors.