Welcome to Gaia! ::

Every three months I drive down to LA with my mother and that is a six hour drive. She doesn't want to listen to music the whole way, so she started buying books on CD. Sometimes they are good and sometimes, not so much. Once she got the book with the worst reader. The story was obviously great, but the reader was just so terrible I don't think we ever finished listening to it.

I adore them. There's no other way I could get my book-fix while washing dishes & mopping the floor & doing various other mindless chores.

I find, too, that in addition to getting to hear old favorites read to me, I'll listen to some books I wouldn't necessarily have the patience to read. I just finished A Short History of World War I. It was quite interesting, in a macabre sort of way, and I learned a lot, but if I'd been reading it, I'd probably have skimmed most of it ("Oh another battle. More people doing stupid things") and thus would have missed out.

As others have commented, though, the narrator is a make or break point. The Harry Potter series was, I thought, superb. The narrator of Anansi Boys is brilliant. Dracula was also splendid (to name a few that I can recall). On the other hand, the version of Frankenstein I checked out was ghastly--a compplete mootone--and both Phantastes and Lilith were even worse; the narrator was not only reading in a monotone, he was pausing at odd places in the sentence.

I reccomend all of the above books, by the way, in book form.

Audio books are excellent. I actually listened to a non-ficiton one which said that if the average person listened to educational audio programs whenever they were in the car in a few years they would have learned enough to have earned a degree from college.

When I was five, I had an audiobook about a steamshovel. The only other time I've listened to a book on tape was last year in English. I believe it was Red Scarf Girl that we listened to. I only remember it being extremely boring.

I have put in a request from the library for the novel Lolita on CD with Jeremy Irons as the narrator. All those hours of listening to Jeremy Irons read will be heavenly.

However, I don't really need it for long car rides anymore unless I'm going to shop at the mall on weekends or go to see a movie. I can have it playing in the background while I draw in my sketch book instead of random music.

Lolita presents an unique aspect in that Irons portrayed Humbert in the film version so it seems natural that he'd actually be reading the story.

I requested a couple more audiobooks read by Jeremy Irons through inter-library loan. whee Yes, I do love his voice!