The Reader in My Head -- by Sarah Nicholson

 

Image by Vinzent Weinbeer from Pixabay

I’m a great fan of audio books. I’ve been a member of Audible since a month long stay in hospital at the end of 2018 and I’ve had a story on the go ever since.

Listening to stories on long car journeys goes back even further. When the boys were small, we borrowed story cassettes from the local library for our trips up and down the A1 visiting family.

We were particularly fond of the Diamond Brother books by Anthony Horowitz. Then progressed to his Alex Rider stories (at the same time as we made the technological leap from cassettes to CDs) which made the miles fly by. When my son was home from university at Christmas, we watched series 1 and 2 of the new TV adaptation. I only had a vague recollection of the storyline even though the general plot is the same one I heard years ago.

“Can’t you remember that bit?” my now grown-up son asks almost indignantly.

He has the advantage that he has also read the books. I am disadvantaged as I was driving whilst listening and that does require a bit more multi-tasking effort.

Audio books are a marvellous way of listening to a great story at the same time as doing something else more mindless, ironing, washing up, travelling or another of my favourites, something to listen to in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep but my eyes are too tired to read.

It usually doesn’t take long before I drift off again, as long as I set the timer for ten to fifteen minutes, I know I won’t miss too much or have to skip back too many minutes the next night.

My mum is the exact opposite, once she presses play and the story starts running, she can listen for an hour and be no nearer nodding off. In fact, she is even more wide awake as she has become more involved with the story.

But for all the joys an audio book brings there are for me, at this moment in time, two main problems.

The biggest issue is narrator, nine times out of ten this is spot on.

Some actors could read the telephone directory and it would sound mellifluous, I will admit to listening to David Tennant reading War of the Worlds more than once just as a soporific back drop to a sleepless night, I know the story well enough to dip in and out.

But my current audible delight is narrated by an Australian actor with a whiny twang to her accent. I’m persevering but at the start it was a struggle, especially as it’s a long book with many characters to remember. (You can try and guess what it might be but I’m giving nothing else away.)

In contrast I recently finished listening to was A Narrow Door by Joanne Harris, read by Alex Kingston (River Song in Doctor Who) and Steven Pacey (I had to Google him, he was Tarrant in Blakes 7, and I can’t remember now if he was a character I adored or loathed). Each narrated separate chapters from different point of view.

From Joanne Harris's Facebook page

It was pure enjoyment from start to finish as their voices blended together telling a differing perspective of events spanning several years. I never got lost who was speaking or where we were in the plot.

When I finished that I tried to listen to something else, also with two different points of view but with only one narrator (who also happened to be the author) and I confess I soon got confused and gave up. I might be tempted with a physical book if I spot it in the library so I can create my own voices in my head.

The other problem with audio books, it is difficult to flick back a few pages or right to the start to remind yourself who is who or what happened in chapter 1. 

A bicycle was mentioned but what happened to it because there has just been another reference to it - yes I did actually go to the trouble of finding chapter one to re-listen to in this instance but it's just not as easy as sticking your bookmark in the page you are up to and flicking back to scan for the relevant word and re-read the pertinent sentence of two! 

But my whinging is really a #FirstWorldProblem when many people rely on the spoken word. My Nana was one such person who enjoyed her talking books and newspapers. She wasn’t totally blind but as the years passed her macular degeneration deteriorated to the extent that reading text became too difficult.

We have much to be grateful there are so many ways to enjoy stories, reading and listening, even watching dramatic adaptation of novels on the stage or screen.

Telling tales around a camp fire is how storytelling first began long before the masses could read and write so in many ways audible stories just take us back to how it was in the beginning.

But my one piece of advice is - to get the most enjoyment, find a reader you want to allow in your head!