Today's Keyboard Smash
Mar. 29th, 2021 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksI really resent that I can be expected to work when there are so many Bunny Day eggs and crafting recipes to seek out in Animal Crossing. Doesn't the world understand priorities? These balloons aren't going to shoot themselves down.
I've finally, after weeks of having it on the Walkman but just dicking about with podcasts, started listening to my next audiobook: Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I tried to read it as a paperback during my last year of college--several times, in fact. I just couldn't get through it. Not out of any dislike of either the style or the substance, but out of total incomprehension. Despite being more than passingly familiar with world mythology and folklore, and despite being sufficiently well-versed in the usual tools of fantasy fiction, I remember it only as a completely baffling series of unrelated vignettes.
Vignettes, I note with interest, I now remember with remarkable accuracy. As each plot point and side story slides into place, I find I remember both the content and the tone of the scenes. I'm curious to see at what point I finally reach material I haven't heard before. I assume that point will come eventually, though I suppose it's possible I finished the book entirely back then. I might have come out the other side still with no idea of what had happened. I have the paperback itself--somewhere--and it very likely still has whatever I was using for a bookmark at the time, marking the point at which I gave up again.
This whole phenomenon is not without precedent for me. It took me many tries to get through Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. While I remember bits and pieces of that one, I could not, on pain of death, tell you how it ends. Admittedly, that was also one I attempted to read for the first time in college and it wasn't until several years later that I succeeded. Maybe college was just a bad time for me to be reading things. Ironic, given my English major. (I'm thinking of picking up the audio version of Wind-Up Bird too, to see if it sticks any better this time around.)
I truly have the most appalling reading comprehension and retention. I can, comparatively, recite movie lines after a single viewing. Apparently, I am wired for sound and very little else*. Living in an age of relatively affordable audiobooks (I did not relish dropping sixty bucks for ten or twelve hours of story in CDs, let me tell you) and ubiquitous podcasts of all types is truly a delight.
*How does this jibe with my audio processing problems and the fact that I have difficulty understanding people in person and insist on closed captioning for media? Uhhhhhh... *jazzhands* Brains!
I've finally, after weeks of having it on the Walkman but just dicking about with podcasts, started listening to my next audiobook: Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I tried to read it as a paperback during my last year of college--several times, in fact. I just couldn't get through it. Not out of any dislike of either the style or the substance, but out of total incomprehension. Despite being more than passingly familiar with world mythology and folklore, and despite being sufficiently well-versed in the usual tools of fantasy fiction, I remember it only as a completely baffling series of unrelated vignettes.
Vignettes, I note with interest, I now remember with remarkable accuracy. As each plot point and side story slides into place, I find I remember both the content and the tone of the scenes. I'm curious to see at what point I finally reach material I haven't heard before. I assume that point will come eventually, though I suppose it's possible I finished the book entirely back then. I might have come out the other side still with no idea of what had happened. I have the paperback itself--somewhere--and it very likely still has whatever I was using for a bookmark at the time, marking the point at which I gave up again.
This whole phenomenon is not without precedent for me. It took me many tries to get through Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. While I remember bits and pieces of that one, I could not, on pain of death, tell you how it ends. Admittedly, that was also one I attempted to read for the first time in college and it wasn't until several years later that I succeeded. Maybe college was just a bad time for me to be reading things. Ironic, given my English major. (I'm thinking of picking up the audio version of Wind-Up Bird too, to see if it sticks any better this time around.)
I truly have the most appalling reading comprehension and retention. I can, comparatively, recite movie lines after a single viewing. Apparently, I am wired for sound and very little else*. Living in an age of relatively affordable audiobooks (I did not relish dropping sixty bucks for ten or twelve hours of story in CDs, let me tell you) and ubiquitous podcasts of all types is truly a delight.
*How does this jibe with my audio processing problems and the fact that I have difficulty understanding people in person and insist on closed captioning for media? Uhhhhhh... *jazzhands* Brains!
