Listen Carefully

Books are selfish, they demand full attention and if I don’t give it to them they will hold onto their secrets and mysteries and divulge nothing.   I can’t read while doing ANYTHING else.  I read a study about how teenagers can multi-task better than most adults.  Well, duh, they grew up in a world where everything has a lower case “i” in front of it to help them sort out their MTV worlds and practice their multi-tasking skills.  I had no such devices, but still grew up in the MTV world wherein every image is edited in a series and no single image is onscreen for more than twenty seconds.

There is ONE thing I can do while reading.  I can eat.  I can sit down with a bowl of some partially hydrogenated snack with sodium and high fructose corn syrup and read and add a fresh layer of plaque to my arteries and another inch or two to my waist because I can eat with a lot more vigor than I can read.

For some reason, the crunching
doesn't bother my reading

Sigh.

Reading on a treadmill is a revolutionary new way to fall off treadmills. Reading while cooking dinner is a great way to overcook food. Reading in a waiting room is OK, but the timing is unpredictable and I lose the narrative voice and tension reading in small increments.  Even music takes me away from what I’m reading.  I’ve never thought of myself as having ADHD, but I never thought about it long enough to figure out if I actually had it.

Audiobooks, good books with good readers, are like my occupational therapy.  Once the ear buds are in and my attention is locked, the world is mine and the book I want to read is no longer anchoring my butt to a chair.  It’s freedom.   

I worked two jobs for extra cash that helped me plow through countless hours of books. 

You ever open your screen door and get annoyed because some yahoo shoved a flyer for some stupid useless thing in it?  Or maybe you go into the grocery store, load your things in the car, start driving away and the flyer is tucked under the windshield wiper, just out of reach so you have to pull over, get out and get rid of it? 

Yeah, I did that.

 For about six months I passed out flyers for a female-only gym in Raleigh, NC.  The flyer was a picture of a morbidly obese woman in a bathing suit, shot from behind, with the name of the gym at the top and some horrible phrase about how you don’t want to look like this at the beach. 

I’m not making this up, and I sure didn’t make the flyer.  I just distributed it.  I swear.   

Anyway, I put on sunglasses, a hat, a fake mustache, (kidding, I didn’t have one) a backpack full of flyers and an old Sony Discman with headphones and away I went. 

Tom Stechulte

I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men on CD at the library.  I heard folks talking about it and knew the Coen Brothers were going to make a movie so I decided it was time to check it out.  The reader, an actor with the unpronounceable last name Stechschulte narrated McCarthy’s prose in a gruff, pained voice I could listen to all day.

I was even disappointed in the movie version simply because the characters just didn’t sound right to me.  I listened to it twice and fit in an actual reading thereafter

. 

Tom Stechschulte also read I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay and Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane.  He gets it just right every time, I could listen to him read my Saturday shopping list and be riveted.

I walked through every neighborhood in North Raleigh accompanied by Stechsulte and McCarthy, for three or four hours at a time, dropping flyers on cars and screen doors. I ignored the uncomfortable feelings as I advanced through everyone’s front yard to their front door. I was getting paid to read and exercise. I felt like an explorer venturing into cul-de sacs.  

I was hooked.  I loved being able to move and “read” at the same time.  It helped that McCarthy was such a new experience for me. 

 I followed it with the first three Dexter books, McCarthy’s The Road, The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, a ton of Phillip K. Dick stories, The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney,  Anansi Boys by Neil Gaimen, short stories by Poe and Kafka and Bradbury, westerns and crime stories by Elmore Leonard and rediscovered my appreciation for Stephen King. 

I stopped reading King when From a Buick 8 was published.  I hated that book.  It was dull and I just couldn’t get into it.  Until I listened to it, and the readers were outstanding and brought the book to life.

At that point I never read Salem’s Lot (I don’t like vampires) but the audiobook is fantastic,  Ron McLarty is a great reader, and lends his deep, mean voice to other King works like Blaze, Stationary Bike, and A Very Tight Place from Just After Sunset.   I can’t imagine a better reader for horror novels.

Except Campbell Scott, who read my favorite King book, The Shining. 

There would be no way I could have finished Lisey’s Story in book form, but Mare Winngham found the narrative for me and delivered it pitch perfect from beginning to end, somehow taking passages that looked silly in print and translated the tension and wonder. 

I was also working on Saturdays mowing lawns, blowing leaves and dirt and cleaning up yards.  There I listened to On Writing and felt like Steve and I were just buddies having a conversation.  I went through it twice, with an actual reading in between. 

When the woman-only gym closed down and the yard work dried up for the winter, I cleaned out the library of every last book I had any interest in whatever.  Dog needs to go out?  Fifteen minutes of 11/22/63.  Forty five minutes of cardio is another forty five minutes of The Passage by Justin Cronin.  

It doesn’t always work, I couldn’t get through several crime novels I won’t name due either to boring serial killer fiction or a listless reading.  Compared to the number of books I start reading and never finish though, it’s a fraction. 

Audible.com is a great source, but in my mind a little expensive.  The library is the best place to start; most libraries have online catalogs with mp3’s to download and dozens of great books you can listen to.  

If you like horror fiction www.pseudopod.org has some great stories by great authors, but be prepared, the going is rough and DARK.  The SF equivalent, Escape Pod and the fantasy version, Podcastle are also interesting places to find fiction.  

Some of my favorites to get you started:  

BLACK HILL by Orrin Grey - The best horror story ever about oil drilling.

HOMETOWN HORRIBLE by Matthew Bey  - A great, disturbing read with a grotesque ending. 

COME TO MY ARMS MY BEAMISH BOY - by Douglas F. Warrick  - Takes the scariest subject I know of, Alzheimer's Disease and gives it a surreal, nightmarish shape with a strangely beautiful ending.