AUDIOBOOKS: DO BETTER.
I’m audio-reading Tori Amos’s “Resistance”. It’s incredible, and quite an informative lesson in politics. I’m surprised by how much I’ve learned. Throughout it, she recites songs as spoken word pieces, and let me tell you that woman can emote. She should seriously do like a mini-tour of only spoken word pieces and solo piano pieces. The Deconstruction Tour. I can see it now…
But using Apple Books to audio-read has been a lackluster, underwhelming, if not downright frustrating experience. The track numbers don’t match the chapter numbers, which is my biggest pet peeve. And track numbers are essentially the only metadata included. I guess I’m lucky they included an image of the book’s original cover. And (and I know how this is gonna sound, but hear me out) there’s no transcription of any kind anywhere which means I can’t go back to a part that I want to re-audio-read. Yes, I get that a transcribed audiobook is a book. But I’m still frustrated and feeling totally left in the dark because there’s no way I can fast-forward or rewind to what I want to hear again, because there’s no way I’d be able to tell where it’s at.
Audiobooks should come with an eBook version. Even if it’s like a stripped down, plain text file. Give me something I can work with.
Hell, books should come with an eBook version.
Record labels are doing that - buy a vinyl album, get a digital download of it. And if record labels can do it, surely publishers can.
GET ME NEIL ON THE LINE, NO I CAN’T HOLD
Michael and I took a walk to the branch library.
We can see the building from our back door, but you can’t walk there in a straight line because the fenced off baseball fields and playground are in the way. (We just love those fenced off baseball fields and playground. They aren’t a nuisance at all, and neither are the parents who bring their kids to them in the summer, who take up all the street parking and yell and scream and yell and cheer and yell and yell. And certainly the small playground on which play the younger, louder, screamier siblings of the baseball playing kids is not as big of an eyesore as the used car lot up the street. It’s not a plastic monstrosity of blue and red made occasionally patriotic by the white, christofascist private school attending, taxpayer-funded voucher-presenting children who climb on it and scream and yell and cheer and yell and yell. Both the baseball fields and the playground are just beautiful, necessary additions to our quaint urban neighborhood that we fully embrace and adore and love from 10 feet away. Just adore and love, I tell you!)
I was picking up a book club book for the book club I belong to at work that I’ve never attended and never read a book for. I got about 5-minutes into a selected audiobook once. My boss literally handed me her copy of a selected book once. Neither interested me enough to be, well, interested.
The quarterly discussion group meeting is always on my calendar, and always I find an excuse not to go.
But today at the library, another book caught my eye while we were walking around the branch, which Michael hadn’t seen since its renovation during the pandemic. Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman. It was shelved face-forward and the cover art, created by Colleen Doran, tugged at me.
Of course I’d only heard of it from “Carbon” which is a song by Tori Amos on her album Scarlet’s Walk, a loosely semi-autobiographical concept album about a trip through post 9/11 America. The song is probably my favorite on that record. It has an irregular time signature, 6/8 or 12/8 or something - I can never remember any of them besides 3/4 and 4/4 and 2/4. (I get so proud of myself when I recognize a 2/4 measure has been tacked on to the end of a 4/4 measure to add an extra beat before settling back into 4/4.)
“Carbon” has the great lyric, “Just keep your eyes on her horizon” (which I hear as “keep your eyes on her her eyes on”). It’s also one of several Tori Amos songs that contains a wink to Neil Gaiman. Tori Amos fans love it when Tori Amos winks to Neil Gaiman.
Get me Neil on the line
no, I can’t hold
Have him read
”Snow, Glass, Apples” where nothing is what it seems
”Little Sis, you must crack this,”
he says to me
”You must go in again
Carbon-made only wants to be un-made”
Blade to ice, it’s
Double Diamond time
I grabbed it from its place on the shelf. I recited the lyric to Michael, who didn’t really care but would never say that out loud when I talk about Tori Amos. I commented on the artwork. He said he liked it, too.
I checked it out with the collection of Kurt Vonnegut short stories I probably won’t read for the book club meeting I probably won’t go to.
But this book, “Snow, Glass, Apples”, I’ll be adding this book to my own library.
