Richard French, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Richard French
Filling Empty Spaces: On Audiobooks 5/22/2017 3:21:05 PM
For centuries, the printing press has been our main source for written public communications. Now we have alternatives -- the internet, ebooks, mobile phones, and also audiobooks.
I've listened to novels and short stories on audiobooks for more than 25 years. I began when I worked in central Ontario, and needed to drive at least four hours for meetings or to visit a colleague or to fill in at a congregation as preacher or drive for a few vacation days off.
Abridged versions of novels by Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, and others helped me pass the time and get reacquainted with classic works of fiction. Technology had created a way for me to enhance what might have been tiresome hours.
I also had and still have complete versions of Mark Twain's two most famous novels, "Alice in Wonderland", two by Hawthorne, and one each by Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, and George Eliot. Besides that, I've been able to get to know better epic works by Homer and Virgil.
I recall two highlights from my times of driving and listening. Reaching home territory after a four hour drive and coming to the end of a shortened version of Hardy's novel "The Mayor of Casterbridge", I realized that the problems of middle-aged people was a main theme of the fiction I've written and decided to continue with that motif. Another time, while driving on a southern Ontario highway, I heard a narrator read John Steinbeck's description of the same spot of earth in "Travels with Charlie".
So audiobooks have helped to make what could have been empty spaces full of interest. Now, in retirement when I live without a car, audiobooks perform the same service in another way. After I began physio exercises for my upper back and stiff neck, my therapist said I should lie on the floor at least fifteen minutes a day with my head lifted up. I could never succeed at that without something to focus my thoughts on. Ah-ha! Audiobooks.
My appreciation for audiobooks moved to a new level as I lay on the living room floor of my apartment for 15-20 minutes for most nights over several months and listened to the English actor Neville Jason read Marcel Proust's seven volume masterpiece without faltering once or confusing the voices he chose for Proust's characters. He brought the work to life for me in a way that reading it silently to myself didn't. An amazing achievement for a man still working in his late 70's.
I'm now listening to an unabridged reading of Henry James's late novel, "The Wings of the Dove", which I'll have to listen to again, since I miss a few things at first hearing.
The point is that present-day technology, which brings challenges and obstacles to non-technical folks, can also fill empty spaces and significantly improve our lives.
