Audiobooks: What's my problem?

I want to be an audiobook user. Reader? Listener? OK, I don’t even know the correct term. I love the idea of experiencing books in a different way, of having someone literally tell me a story. And I like the potential multitasking, too. I could be reading and knitting. Or cleaning. Or driving.

But it just keeps not happening. This despite the fact that I have once joined Audible, multiple times laboriously downloaded books on CD from the library, then transferred them to various iDevices and even tried Playaways, those self-contained audiobooks.

My most recent attempt was with The Quick by Lauren Owen. It’s a book that appears to be in my wheelhouse and the only format the library had it in was audio. So I got it. On a trip up the Keys last week, I started listening.

But the problem was that my attention just kept wavering. And it wasn’t the story’s fault — the story was interesting! I want to read this book. In fact, I want to read it so much that I requested the library purchase it as an ebook, which they did. The rest of you who are into historical/supernatural/British/literary fiction can thank me later. I’ve already got it checked out.

A similar thing happened over the summer, when I tried so many times I’m embarrassed to admit it to listen to The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. I love Sarah Vowell. And she reads the book, along with a bunch of special guest stars like John Hodgeman and Stephen Colbert. I love history, and don’t mind if it’s got a bit of snark to it. It should have been like the best extended episode of  This American Life ever. But again, my attention kept drifting. And this despite the fact that some of the time I was listening to it I was on buses of various species, traveling across the state of Massachusetts. There could not be conditions better suited to listening to that book.

Another work about some of the same characters, John Barry’s book on Roger Williams, is very useful for putting me to sleep on plane trips, I have learned. But I still don’t feel like i know much about Roger Williams. And I’d like to. And I like John Barry.

I’ve only found audiobooks really successful a couple times in my life. During really long car trips where you just have no choice. During long, boring projects like painting a room. And back in the 1990s when I used to cover the county for the Miami Herald and spent a lot of time driving up and down the Keys. The two-cassette abridged versions of John D. MacDonald novels were perfect for a single trip — and maybe it didn’t matter so much if I zoned out a little along the way. They were abridged anyway.

Even though I’ve given up on The Quick, I’m going to keep trying. Though it might take me until my next long car ride, or painting project.

The impressive old ladies of Cape Cod

While I was in Cape Cod learning how to make radio at Transom, I produced two pieces. My final project started out being about the local candlepin bowling alley, but became a story about one bowler -- the inimitable 94-year-old Nellie Kenyon. You can listen to it here.

The first story, produced as an assignment for WCAI's Creative Life series, was about the Provincetown Public Press, a project of the awe-inspiring-especially-for-its-size Provincetown Public Library. Reporting that story, I met one of their authors, Marilyn Colburn, who was really nice -- and turned out to be the friend and neighbor of several of my Key West friends. Small world, many connections between outposts. Here's that story.

Here's a take-home lesson I didn't expect: Older folks might want to consider staying up north for the winter. Because the Cape seems to be full of energetic, intelligent people in their 80s and 90s. My classmate Alison Byrne produced a great piece about the senior center's poetry group and Falmouth's 99-year-old poet laureate -- I'll link to it as soon as it airs. I'm starting to think I should make Cape Cod my retirement plan. Meanwhile, my journey home starts this evening -- I'm taking the Silver Meteor train from DC to Miami. Once I get home, get unpacked and get geared up, I'll be making more radio. So keep an ear on this space.

What I'm up to. And my classmates, too!

Normally, I wouldn't just make a blog post that simply links to another blog post. Because that's what Facebook and Twitter are for, right? But since I'm all about the radio at the moment, I thought I'd provide this link. And this excellent photo, which is our class photo (we had to top or at least match the previous class, which had arranged a Last Supper kind of deal). Anyway, here's what we have to say about what we've learned in the workshop, so far. A lot of it is very helpful for writing in general, radio writing in particular, and how to approach storytelling. As you can see, we were all very impressed with Nancy Updike, one of the founding producers of This American Life, who came and spent a class with us.

If you're at all interested in radio storytelling and how it works, I encourage you to check out other features on Transom. The site includes stories about/interviews with great radio producers, as well as just plain great radio stories. Check it out. And if you can't just up and leave your life and loved ones to hang out in Woods Hole (applications for the fall workshop are now open!), check out the online offerings.

Old print dog starts learning new radio tricks

I feel like I've crossed some kind of Rubicon by spending more time over the last three weeks listening than reading. It makes perfect sense since those three weeks have been spent in an immersive radio school -- which for an old print person with extremely limited radio experience like myself feels a bit like entering Radio Grad School without having taken Radio 101.

Fortunately, the instructors and fellow students are as nice, smart, helpful and encouraging as could be.

Sometime in the last week between a presentation by a talented podcaster named Jonathan Groubert (whose podcast is called The State We're In) and grilling a talented classmate half my age who doesn't own an actual radio, I think I finally Got It about podcasts and how radio reaches people now. I am familiar with podcasts -- I used to laboriously download the BBC Newspod and NPR Books podcast to my computer via iTunes, then transfer them to an iPod, then listen while folding laundry or whatever. But that's a pain in the ass and I got out of the habit. I have occasionally downloaded episodes of This American Life or On the Media to my phone and listened there. But mostly, in a pretty old-fashioned, analog kind of way, I get my radio from the radio.

It turns out nobody, or at least nobody under the age of 30, does this anymore.* And that podcasting, now around for 10 years, is hitting its stride in a really interesting way. I had been thinking of podcasts as a way to catch up to radio shows that you missed, or that are not carried on your local station. They are that, but there are also smart, creative people out there making podcasts that aren't carried on many stations, or any stations at all. And you can get them .. for free! On your phone!

If you have a smartphone, you probably have a built-in podcast app. There are also lots of apps out there that make it even easier (Talented Classmate Half My Age recommended one called Downcast, which seems to be well worth the $2.99).**

So what I have been listening to? Of course This American Life, because how can you not? And I subscribed to some old favorites like On the Media, Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me and a bunch of podcasts from the BBC and KCRW.

But I'm most excited about the ones that are new to me. Start at Radiotopia which gathers seven really cool podcasts -- my favorite is 99% Invisible but they are all good. It's not all new stuff either; Fugitive Waves is work from the archives of the Kitchen Sisters and Radio Diaries has the work of producer Joe Richman. These are people whose stories are used as "texts" in radio grad school -- with the added benefit that they are a pleasure to listen to. You learn stuff and you're engaged/entertained.

You know what else I found out? John Oliver has a podcast! It's called The Bugle and it's done with Andy Zaltzman and it's very funny, especially if you're an aficionado of Anglo-American humor/satiric political commentary. Since I haven't talked anyone into handing over their HBO Go password to me yet, I was excited to learn I could get some free Oliver on a weekly basis. Another comedy podcast I haven't listened to yet is WTF with Marc Maron -- and classmates whose judgment I trust say it's great.

There are tons more and I won't list them all. But if you're curious, leave a comment and I'll try to find a recommendation in your area of interest.

And since this is supposed to be a book blog, I'll make a reading recommendation. I finally broke down during a trip into Falmouth this week and went into the really nice Eight Cousins bookstore. I bought a copy of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. It was a quick read and exactly what I needed. And it's set in these parts -- on fictional Alice Island, which doesn't exist in real life but which you reach via ferry from Hyannis.

The titular A.J. Fikry is a cranky widower who owns a bookstore on Alice Island. His life is changed entirely when a 2-year-old girl is left in the bookstore aisle. Blurbs and jacket copy recommend it for readers who liked The Art of Racing in the Rain and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society -- books I always felt I should have read when I was working at the library but avoided because I'm allergic to sentimental, uplifting stuff. But this book (A.J. Fikry) manages to be sweet while avoiding the saccharine. And it is suffused with a love of books and reading and writing. So I recommend it, though probably not to my more skeptical reading friends, or those looking for something with sharper edges.

* It's not just people under 30! Turns out this group also includes ... Ira Glass, the godfather of the public radio revolution (wait that's a bad metaphor -- the Fidel Castro of the Radio Revolution? The Leon Trotsky of the radio revolution?). Anyway here's what he said in response to a reader question in the Guardian:

When do you listen to the radio?

In the morning, when I shave. And really, not for very long. I don't hear the radio that much. I don't own a radio. I listen to everything through apps, or on my iPhone. And then I download the shows I like. Shows like Fresh Air,Radiolab, Snap Judgement, all those shows.

** TCHMA and I had a funny moment yesterday in class when we realized we were both thinking about the story of the guys behind the @Horse_ebooks Twitter feed (and more projects that may or may not constitute Internet performance art). I read the story in The New Yorker. He heard it on TLDR, the On The Media spinoff podcast. The title stands for Too Long Didn't Read -- in other words, it's the anti-New Yorker. We then raced to see which outlet had it first. Turns out Susan Orlean broke the story on the New Yorker's blog. I think.

After they're gone

It happens every time -- I wind up obsessed with the writers who appeared at the Key West Literary Seminar for months after the event. Perhaps it's just the inevitable effect of spending four days in their company, or thinking about their subjects. I at least have a valid excuse for reading After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman after the Seminar -- because it wasn't published until February. What a great read it is -- an unconventional crime novel in many ways, more of an examination of what happens to a family when its center mysteriously disappears. In this case it was first Felix Brewer, and later his mistress, who disappeared exactly 10 years after her lover. Many assumed she had gone to join him -- until her body showed up 12 years after that.

Another decade has passed by the time it gets taken up as a cold case by Sandy Sanchez, a retired homicide detective now working as a consultant for the Baltimore Police Department. But the real pleasure of the book is not just following Sandy's investigation, but in learning the story through chapters that move fluidly among characters and in different times. It provides a portrait of Baltimore in the second half of the 20th century, for the most part, in a particular upper middle class Jewish circle. And it never flags -- while in some books that alternate viewpoints you just can't wait to get away from some characters and back to others (ahem, George R.R. Martin), in this one every single chapter was interesting in its own right and I was always glad to pick up with whomever Lippman wanted to tell us about next. The whodunit aspect is satisfying, in the end (I hadn't guessed it) but the real pleasure of this book, for me, was the people.

Speaking of compelling characters, I've just caught up to Malla Nunn's series of Emmanuel Cooper novels (s0 far) with an advanced copy of Present Darkness, which publishes in June. The books are set in South Africa in the early 1950s, just as apartheid is being instituted, and it's a fascinating, horrifying, fraught time period especially for a man in Cooper's position. I don't want to offer any spoilers but suffice it to say that Cooper's background and upbringing means he's in a position to cross a lot of lines. He's also a World War II vet with a nasty case of PTSD decades before that term would be applied -- in his case it manifests as migraines and the voice of his Scottish drill instructor issuing orders and advice inside his head. Start with the first in the series -- A Beautiful Place to Die -- and read them in order.

I had always considered apartheid the most outrageous social atrocity of my high school and college years, and its ending a miracle of my adulthood -- but I had never really sat back and thought about 1) how insanely recent it was 2) its endless complicated consequences for the people who actually had to live with it and 3) how bizarre it was in a country that had just sent soldiers to World War II -- fighting against and defeating a regime built on ethnic hatred. Cooper is a classic crime fiction hero in many ways -- a flawed but admirable man who seeks to do good in a deeply screwed up world. It's a tribute to Nunn's skill that I find myself missing his world when I finish one of her books -- because who would really want to live under those conditions? Yet her people and the plots are so compelling that want to know what happens next for Detective Sergeant Cooper. Like Matthew Shardlake (C.J. Sansom's Tudor series), Gaius Petraeus Ruso (Ruth Downie's Medicus series) and Jackson Brodie (Kate Atkinson), I am eager to hear how he will get out of his next tight spot and figure out a way to, improbably, do some good.