On Audiobooks

I enjoy listening to a good book. I can lie back, close my eyes, and envelope myself in setting and make friends with the characters. I particularly like the audio book for the road trip or commute. In that situation there is less eye-closing and more mental engagement that makes the minutes sitting on 280 just fly by.

On my recent holiday road trip I listened to Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. I thought I'd loved The Kite Runner. Wow. I liked this one better, I think, but they're both brilliant. I love listening to this story unravel as the miles flew by. After that, I started Ian McEwan's Atonement. It's a completely different story, but has a similar theme of a character being at the mercy of their cultural and political surroundings. It's been made into a film and is currently in theaters. I wanted to read it before I saw the film, and I have to say that there is a LOT there and it will be interesting to see how they pull that off.

When I'm in these phases of listening to the books, I become a little like Will Farrell's character in Stranger than Fiction. I hear narration in my head as I go about my day. I describe surroundings, use metaphor, imagine back stories of strangers, etc. The voice is female and has a British accent - a posh London one, specifically. I'm not saying it's normal - I'm saying it's what happens.