Audiobooks

I’ve began listening to audiobooks this week, my first listening experience being Louis Theroux’s The Call of the Weird. My roommate, Jamie graciously gifted this book to me in paperback form this past christmas but I was never able to get past the second chapter before the trials of University life swept be back under the dusty jackets of text books and online journals. This may be a tangent but my semester was filled with unnecessary research, lectures I was not enrolled in, and an odd amount of busy work that had nothing to do with Design—ah, the life of a part-time student. I took it upon myself to fill my days with as much productive procrastination as possible, and although that also included occasionally watching The View I could not seem to remember the witty, humorous and often sad stories of Mr. Theroux that were just sitting on my desk waiting for me.

So today, rather than physically opening the book, I plugged in the audio version and had at it. Audio books once seemed like a great option for the blind, or aging demographic; even the housewife on-the-go or some other horrible stereotype. But not anymore. I am hardly an audiobook connoisseur, but I intend on listening to them for a time to come. When I can’t find the right music, or can not be bothered to look through endless blogs for some new tunes only to come up with a lone remix…never again. I suppose music will always stimulate a different part of the brain than spoken voice, and is it safe to say audiobooks are more distracting than music when it comes to driving, working out, etc? Every hour or so I noticed myself phasing out, and rather than reading slower and taking in less, I just missed out on about ten pages of text! So I rewound, and continued listening as if it were a lecture of some kind, catching some jokes, some deliberate, some that may not have been meant to be funny.

Theroux, who reads his own text constantly inflects a sense of worry in in his voice, which, for a while is quite funny and honest in itself, but after a while made me want to ask, “Are you alright? Are you going to be ok?” He quotes his past interviewees in a relatively convincing American accent and does so in a passively comedic way. He does not want to admit that his stories are humorous, but he certainly cannot deny it either. The near absurdity of some of his subjects, and the eccentric, sometimes extremist individuals he interviews overshadow much of the journalistic, non-bias Theroux strives for. He rehashes past interviews from the filming of his BBC documentaries in which he penetrates fringe cultures like the porn industry, survivalists, and alien hunters. The book acts as a “reunion tour” of his American documentaries. He tries to reconnect with people from his past interviews, many of whom had significant revelations in their lives. As I have seen several of these documentaries, it is much like revisiting ideas from my own past and reevaluating individuals in a new light (you know, those weird people you no longer associate with?).

So far the audiobook “thing” is working out pretty well for me. I was able to get through half the book in just a couple hours and should be finished in time to start another book by the end of the week. I may be working everyday, well, freelance jobs at least, but my desire to procrastinate productively has not gone away. Maybe audiobooks are a phase…maybe not.