Listen to Literature

After the last two posts with games, I'll return to something different. So the topic of this post will be 'books on tape' - or rather 'books on CD' in these times.

Admittedly at first I wasn't a fan of this idea. To a reader like me the idea of people just putting a couple of tapes - or CDs - into a recorder and listen to them in order to absorb the story of a book seemed quite pointless. To me half of the fun usually is to imagine everything in my head. But in recent weeks I've bought two books on CD, both German (though one, "Miss America" by Gayle Tufts isn't really completely German as Ms. Tufts is American and the mistress of 'Dinglish' - a mixture between German and English). I haven't regretted it at all.

Unlike the radio plays of my childhood (there's a whole market in Germany for plays on cassette, or CD these days, for children), those CDs were just like a person (actually both times the person writing the book, as both books were written by comedians) reading them to me ... something of which I have fond memories from childhood as well. I have both of them on my computer now - I've got a whole host of CDs on my computer, not because I don't own them, but because this way I don't have to change the CDs and can listen to them whenever I want ... and load them on my mp3-player as well.

I'm listening to "Miss America" at the moment, enjoying the very unique speaking patterns of Ms. Tufts, and writing this post (I always write long posts on my word processor before uploading them, it's easier for me). That's a comfortable way to absorb thoughts of others while working ... or for example while taking a long trip in a car. Judging from my past experiences with radio stations and their reach, it would be better than to search for a new station every twenty or so minutes. But maybe I just enjoy this because I was born to do multi-tasking ... I don't really know.

I still enjoy reading very much, but by now I know that listening to books on CD between two books to read can be fun...