For the first time, I tried listening to an (almost) completely unfamiliar book at work. Up to this point, it's all been ones I've listened to before. But I had a decent setup at work and wanted to try it out. Mostly successful, though by the end of the day, people get chatty and I'll have to backtrack a way tomorrow to get back to the last point that I actually absorbed.
The book is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I have, in the most technical sense, read this before. It was assigned to one of my college classes on New Media. I in no way read the book while taking the class, as I did not read the vast majority of assigned books during college. (It's--it's complicated, I got very good grades, I'm just deeply strange.) I did read it, at least in part, after class ended, and I still own that copy.
I haven't come back to it since then, though. I only remember a few, mostly trivial details. Listening to it, more of the story is vaguely familiar, though I have no idea how the plot is actually going to unfold. It's more of a mystery, or perhaps suspense is the better word, than I remembered.
One little problem that I find more ironic and amusing than meaningfully annoying, is that the files pulled from the CDs cut off too soon. The tail time on a digital file needs to be long enough to accommodate the various idiosyncratic ways that different playback methods advance from one track to the next. Depending on which program or device you use, you may get anything from a long pause, to a seamless transition, to an abrupt jump. In this case, my little Walkman has shown a tendency to create very little pause between tracks on its own. Normally, this just makes things a bit rushed but doesn't actually drop out any content.
Not so with this audiobook. Every time it moves from one track to the next, I'm losing what I can guess is the last one to two words of the final sentence. Mostly, context makes clear how the sentence would end. There have, however, been a couple times when I quite would have liked to hear what word choices were actually used instead of merely guessing.
The reason I classify this as ironic and amusing is because the book is very focused on technology. It's set after 9/11 and was written in 2003, so it's certainly dated now. But its interest in the (then) hypermodern makes it still feel very cutting edge in the moment of listening. The only thing that knocks me out of that feeling has been the ubiquitous use of laptops, rather than cell phones, as the on-the-go device of choice. Still, it's a story about media distribution, about memes, about technology.
There's something amusing, then, in listening to a faulty, almost glitchy rendition of it, ripped from the largely obsolete physical storage method of CDs, on a piece of technology synonymous with the even more outdated cassette tape.
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