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Today's Keyboard Smash
Apr. 5th, 2021 04:27 pmSome thoughts after finishing American Gods:
This is the second full cast production of an audiobook I've listened to. The first was The Graveyard Book, also one of Neil Gaiman's. Which, I suppose, answers one of my questions--why don't more books get this treatment? Well, because it is almost certainly prohibitively expensive to produce and requires some truly magnificent standing on the part of the author to warrant such treatment. That being said, oh, my kingdom for a full cast version of, say, the Lord of the Rings, maybe.
The interesting thing about a full cast, as opposed to the normal single reader format, is that it gave away a couple of twists in this particular story. I shan't say exactly what (heaven forbid I spoil a twenty-year-old novel), but being able to recognize character voices meant I worked out one of the big reveals early. Or at least, I worked it out based on moments that, in the text, would not have revealed so much. I didn't mind. I just enjoyed feeling terribly clever for understanding what was happening before the characters.
(Incidentally, since I talked before about wondering just how much of the story I had read the first time around--yeah, no, no more than half, maybe only a third. It's just that the book is so slow and meandering at times, it was easy to think in the absence of physical pages to track as I went, surely I've gotten through most of the book by now. Hilarious. Barely scratched the surface.)
More generally, I wish audiobooks were just something that all books got automatically. There really is no pleasure in the world to rival having a story read to me. They've become much more affordable, at least, but I want ubiquity.
This is the second full cast production of an audiobook I've listened to. The first was The Graveyard Book, also one of Neil Gaiman's. Which, I suppose, answers one of my questions--why don't more books get this treatment? Well, because it is almost certainly prohibitively expensive to produce and requires some truly magnificent standing on the part of the author to warrant such treatment. That being said, oh, my kingdom for a full cast version of, say, the Lord of the Rings, maybe.
The interesting thing about a full cast, as opposed to the normal single reader format, is that it gave away a couple of twists in this particular story. I shan't say exactly what (heaven forbid I spoil a twenty-year-old novel), but being able to recognize character voices meant I worked out one of the big reveals early. Or at least, I worked it out based on moments that, in the text, would not have revealed so much. I didn't mind. I just enjoyed feeling terribly clever for understanding what was happening before the characters.
(Incidentally, since I talked before about wondering just how much of the story I had read the first time around--yeah, no, no more than half, maybe only a third. It's just that the book is so slow and meandering at times, it was easy to think in the absence of physical pages to track as I went, surely I've gotten through most of the book by now. Hilarious. Barely scratched the surface.)
More generally, I wish audiobooks were just something that all books got automatically. There really is no pleasure in the world to rival having a story read to me. They've become much more affordable, at least, but I want ubiquity.
