Hundred Hand

Books on tape can be great when you want to listen to something more substantive than music but are unable to read. Perhaps you want to listen to a little Pride and Prejudice while you’re pumping iron at the gym, or would like to hear A Modest Proposal while you’re driving to your job at the day care in the morning.

That’s why I was especially excited when I had discovered just how many audio books can be obtained online for free. The best site I had found is Librivox.org, which contains 2763 audio books to date. All of the books there are public domain, which means the author has to have been dead for over 25 years. While that may be disapointing, there are still many great works out there, and odds are, you haven’t read them all already. The authors include Lewis Carrol, James Joyce, Aldus Huxley, Homer, Jane Austin, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, Edgar Allen Poe, etc… etc… etc…

However, the more I’ve been listening, the more I’ve realized why audio books are worth the money they cost. All of the books on Librivox are read and recorded by fans of the site. These people, for the most part, don’t have any training in recording. This might not be such a bad thing if they just read the text, but most of them try to do voice acting while reading and add awkward inflections and dumb voices to the characters. They also may not have very good recording equipment at home, and may have trouble just reading the text without stuttering or having to go back. Also, I guess because they are doing this for free, they don’t feel a second take is merited unless they really screw up.

For longer works, you’ll often find that each chapter is read by a different person. “Through the Looking Glass” was great, but I couldn’t understand the chapter with Humpty Dumpty when they explain the meaning of the poem “Jabberwocky” because the woman reading had such a thick Russian accent. A couple of the readers were excellent, and I was sad to see them go when the chapter was over. I also started listening to “A Doll’s House” by Ibsen, where the main character was read by a woman who clearly had stage experience, but was the only talented one of the voice actors. It was strange listening to her speaking with her husband, who had a great deal of white noise present itself everytime he talked.

I still feel that the idea behind this audio book community is good, but even for free, we need some standards. A roomate of mine once said “Free shit is good shit even if it’s bad shit”, but your time is not free, and if you’re going to devote several hours listening to a book, it shouldn’t take most of your brain power to uninflect what’s being said, and then reinflect it like a normal human.

The greatest of Haydn’s symphonies will still sound like shit if played by a middle school band.