But I Digress | Baby's First Audiobook

Confession time, folks: I'd never listened to an audiobook from beginning to end till 2014. Till this autumn, even.

In my defence, I had tried at various points in the past... but the time I have to spend simply listening is limited. Plus I suck at it, utterly: I have restless hands, so to listen to something I have to be doing something else at the same time. The dishes, for instance. Or driving. 

But I only do so many dishes; I only drive so far.

And there are things I listen to as often as possible. I've been a podcast fan for many years, as long-time TSS readers will recall, so between the Bombcast, Idle Thumbs, Rocket Talk, and the Skiffy and Fanty Show, there's been, before now, more than enough to keep my ears occupied—and I haven't even mentioned BBC Radio 4! There's always something fascinating on there, so on those rare occasions when my podcast supply ran dry, I tended to tune into Woman's Hour or whatnot.

But my circumstances, of late, have changed. Since the Summer I've been commuting to and from work—whihc is an hour and change away—twice a week. Then, sometime in September, the radio in my car broke, and no-one that I've taken it to in subsequent months has been able to identify why.

I ran out of podcasts stored on my phone pretty much immediately, and whilst I did waste an age looking for a few new ones, I came to my senses eventually. I tried streaming some radio, too, but I have a silly small data allowance, and I realised this was going to cost me a small fortune. 

So I bought myself an audiobook. More Fool Me by Stephen Fry, and read by said. He hasn't come up often on The Speculative Scotsman at bottom because he isn't either of those things—speculative or Scottish—but I'm a huge fan of the man, and I'd enjoyed the bits of his autobiography he shared at his live book launch.

More Fool Me lasted me a couple of weeks, and though I had significant problems with it as an autobigraphy—it's repetitive, incomplete and unbelievably brief—to my surprise, I enjoyed the experience of hearing it hugely.

So I doubled down when, all too quickly, it was finished: I bought the audiobook of Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, which I'd been meaning to read since its release.

It's proven to be a completely different experience from More Fool Me. In the first instance, one of the two speakers reads his chapters with such bombast that his voice has been hard to get past. Other problems: this audiobook is fifty-odd hours in full, with long-ass chapters and few suitable stopping points. As such, I frequently find myself flabberghasted by the narrative, picking up as I must in the middle of a chapter. 

I've gone from one extreme to the other, I fear, and so you see: baby's first audiobook may well be baby's last... unless you lend a helping hand.

What I want from an audiobook, it seems, is something accessible. Sometimes that dovetails with my tastes. Something not too long overall, and read without the intrusion that's ruined (the audiobook of) Words of Radiance for me.

Recommend a friend?

Tubing the You | Stephen Fry and the Pedantry of the Senses

Found as per a blog post from fellow Scot, clever clogs and Book of All Hours author Hal Duncan, this is absolutely bloody priceless:

I think I remember hearing this on the its first go-around, on a show British national treasure and sometime Hugh Laurie collaborator Stephen Fry does from time to time for British national treasure and sometime Hugh Laurie collaborator BBC Radio 4. Though I could of course be mistaken.

In any case it's brilliant. To my eternal shame, I've always been a bit of a grammar Nazi. Noting the inappropriate appropriation of impossible apostrophes on shop signs and business cards in particular has been a source of some pride for me, in the past. Rather less so after watching this bit of "kinetic typography," so-called.

But what it the world does "heterodox" mean anyway? And is "sound-sex" a real word, really?

Or am I quite missing the point? ;)


Take it upon yourselves to Tube the You and you're sure enough to find a whole host of other examples of this kinetic typography thing, if you're interested. I found a few pretty decent scenes from The Dark Knight and V for Vendetta, for instance. Admittedly they were less awesome than the clip I've embedded above, but then, they didn't have Stephen Fry in, and life is significantly less worth living during those dry months between seasons of QI when there's no Stephen Fry fun to be had.


As we all know.


So who else among us will be man enough to stand up and be counted as a dirty great punctuation pirate?