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Today's Keyboard Smash
Sep. 3rd, 2020 07:34 pmIn addition to cutting out a bunch of news listening, I also recently cut back on several subscriptions I wasn't really making enough use of to justify. I did this not out of an enormous sense of fiscal responsibility or general practicality. No, I did it to give myself permission to sign up for Libro.fm. It's an alternative to Amazon's Audible service for audiobooks, and it partners with independent bookstores. So I'm essentially buying audiobooks from my most beloved but not very conveniently located indie bookstore, with the convenience and savings of digital-only purchases made at home.
I love everything about it. The first book I got was Garth Nix's Sabriel, because wanting to be able to listen to it whenever I like was the reason I signed up in the first place. (My library only has a digital copy of the audiobook available, which is inconvenient for me, as I cannot put it on the Walkman I use at work. I require ownership of mp3s.) This is a book I have loved since childhood, when I picked it out at the book fair my mother helped organize each year at my elementary school. I still remember seeing that cover art for the first time. Walking up and down the aisles of tables laden with books and coming back to that one again and again.
I had a hard time reading as a child. Nothing that got picked up on by my teachers, probably because they were paying more attention to my admittedly impressive array of behavioral issues. I just always read stories and didn't...quite...follow them. I don't seem to be dyslexic. I do have attention issues and a vivid imagination all too willing to fill in any gaps in the story I remembered, though. Point is, I re-read books constantly. I didn't want to read new things very often--that was hard work. But re-reading a familiar book made the story make more sense each time, like I was bringing the lens into focus a little more on each pass.
I reread Sabriel more times than I can count. It lived on the floor by my bed for years, because I never really stopped reading it. I bought a brass bell with a hideous cherub for a handle because it made me feel like the Abhorsen, wielding my bells to put the dead to rest. When I moved to the new house, bringing only as much as I needed to cope with a few weeks of being mostly alone there in my trailer, I brought a box of belongings, only some of which were books. Some of it was things I wanted to read or play right then. Some of it, though, was simply stuff I didn't want to be separated from. The external hard drive that backed up my computer, at that moment in storage. Some heirlooms. And some books that I just didn't want to have away from me for any length of time. Sabriel was one of them. It just needed to be close to me, needed to be safe.
Hearing the story again now, I'm struck by how logical my love of it is. The issues of growing up different, clever yet intensely aware of a yawning chasm of ignorance in oneself, put in the position of having to live up to a parent's legacy and not knowing how one can ever fit into the shape of them or if that's even desirable--all of that would have called to me as a child. I could not have TOLD you at the time that those themes mattered to me. I probably couldn't even have picked them out at all. I knew I loved swords and bells and flying, adventure and talking animals and the intersection of hurt and comfort. It's only the distance of adulthood that brings that, too, into focus.
I didn't listen to the audio version until a few years ago. So Tim Curry's narration of it isn't burned into my bones like, say, the audio of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy et al. that I listened to while commuting to college for six bonkers months. Don't worry, though. Now that I own it, I'll listen to it so many times, it will just become part of the auditory wallpaper in my head, something I can hear without ever playing the files. Many of the lines already scroll out in my mind ahead of the narration, familiar as an old friend.
I love everything about it. The first book I got was Garth Nix's Sabriel, because wanting to be able to listen to it whenever I like was the reason I signed up in the first place. (My library only has a digital copy of the audiobook available, which is inconvenient for me, as I cannot put it on the Walkman I use at work. I require ownership of mp3s.) This is a book I have loved since childhood, when I picked it out at the book fair my mother helped organize each year at my elementary school. I still remember seeing that cover art for the first time. Walking up and down the aisles of tables laden with books and coming back to that one again and again.
I had a hard time reading as a child. Nothing that got picked up on by my teachers, probably because they were paying more attention to my admittedly impressive array of behavioral issues. I just always read stories and didn't...quite...follow them. I don't seem to be dyslexic. I do have attention issues and a vivid imagination all too willing to fill in any gaps in the story I remembered, though. Point is, I re-read books constantly. I didn't want to read new things very often--that was hard work. But re-reading a familiar book made the story make more sense each time, like I was bringing the lens into focus a little more on each pass.
I reread Sabriel more times than I can count. It lived on the floor by my bed for years, because I never really stopped reading it. I bought a brass bell with a hideous cherub for a handle because it made me feel like the Abhorsen, wielding my bells to put the dead to rest. When I moved to the new house, bringing only as much as I needed to cope with a few weeks of being mostly alone there in my trailer, I brought a box of belongings, only some of which were books. Some of it was things I wanted to read or play right then. Some of it, though, was simply stuff I didn't want to be separated from. The external hard drive that backed up my computer, at that moment in storage. Some heirlooms. And some books that I just didn't want to have away from me for any length of time. Sabriel was one of them. It just needed to be close to me, needed to be safe.
Hearing the story again now, I'm struck by how logical my love of it is. The issues of growing up different, clever yet intensely aware of a yawning chasm of ignorance in oneself, put in the position of having to live up to a parent's legacy and not knowing how one can ever fit into the shape of them or if that's even desirable--all of that would have called to me as a child. I could not have TOLD you at the time that those themes mattered to me. I probably couldn't even have picked them out at all. I knew I loved swords and bells and flying, adventure and talking animals and the intersection of hurt and comfort. It's only the distance of adulthood that brings that, too, into focus.
I didn't listen to the audio version until a few years ago. So Tim Curry's narration of it isn't burned into my bones like, say, the audio of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy et al. that I listened to while commuting to college for six bonkers months. Don't worry, though. Now that I own it, I'll listen to it so many times, it will just become part of the auditory wallpaper in my head, something I can hear without ever playing the files. Many of the lines already scroll out in my mind ahead of the narration, familiar as an old friend.
