One sidelight I’m discovering from listening to Books on Tape is that it’s like watching (or at least listening to) movies that never got made.
I’m listening to a BoT of Starship Troopers (not the one currently for sale on Amazon), and while I have some quibbles with the voice artist, for the most part it’s highly enjoyable. And listening to the book is akin to listening to a real movie made from it, rather than the entertaining light-weight bastardization that hit the theaters. All the little idiosyncratic bits that Heinlein put in, some of which sound odd almost a half-century (!) later, all of which are beloved friends to someone who’s reread the book as often as I have.
It’s a much nicer way to commute.
Oddly enough, I’m preferring Books on Tape to Books on CD. The CDs have better audio quality, no doubt, but few of them are indexed on each disc. That’s a problem if you have a CD changer, since if you (or another driver) flip to another CD (inadvertently or on purpose), then flip back to the BoCD, you have to Fast Forward your way through the disc to find where you left off. And most CD players don’t (for good reason) make the FF function something that’s quick or easy to use. I’ve spend most of a commute FFing at a 3:1 ratio, trying to track down where I was, and then accidentally (because of the CD player interface) dropping back to 0:00 again. Rrg.
Anyway, if you always wanted to watch a movie that was a true adaptation of a book, consider a Book on Tape. You’ll miss the picture, of course, but that’s what your brain’s best able to recreate for you.
Is it not…*shudder*…abridged?
The one I am listening to is unabridged. That’s certainly my preference. It’s just from a different company and a different voice artist (name escapes me at the moment).
From what I’ve been able to glean, the life expectency of a particular BoT edition is about 4-5 years, after which either the license is shifted to another vendor, or there’s some push to have some hot new voice artist create a new edition. It’s a little strange, and irritating that I can’t actually point folks to some of the ones I’m hearing from the library on Amazon.