Jan Austen has her place! She doesn’t quite have the depth of character or plot that I find Hardy has, but I don’t think she ever meant to. She wrote her stories as a way to entertain her family and meant them to be humorous and lighter…. much of which our modern interpretations don’t pick up on, we’ve tried to make them so serious. I think we’re coming around though; the last film adaptations of Emma and Persuasion have done a decent job of integrating the clever wit that Jane Austen wrote with.
Loading...
…and Love and Friendship…I believe was Jane Austen’s too…they did a great job with that film, it’s absurdly hilarious!
Loading...
Jackie, I LOVE audiobooks for many of the reasons you mention-the surprise of a new genre, not keeping track of time, and for me-visualizing the spoken word as it melds into the known references in the brain… sometimes I doodle and make notes while I listen and that’s my journal entry for the day. What a lovely page, prompting me to be grateful for audiobooks.
Loading...
May I recommend Margaret Espaillat’s reading of Middlemarch on LibriVox. At first it seems like she reads really slow and with a lack of personality, but she actually does a fantastic job of navigating all the little tongue twister sentences and I find I’m able to really visualize (like you were saying above) everything as she’s reading, and it just makes it magical…as corny as that sounds 😉
Loading...
And I’ll just throw it out there, while I’m in geeking out about audiobooks, Adrian Praetzellis’ reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is as good as it gets. That’s the one that changed my life!
Jackie, What about Jane Austen?
Jan Austen has her place! She doesn’t quite have the depth of character or plot that I find Hardy has, but I don’t think she ever meant to. She wrote her stories as a way to entertain her family and meant them to be humorous and lighter…. much of which our modern interpretations don’t pick up on, we’ve tried to make them so serious. I think we’re coming around though; the last film adaptations of Emma and Persuasion have done a decent job of integrating the clever wit that Jane Austen wrote with.
…and Love and Friendship…I believe was Jane Austen’s too…they did a great job with that film, it’s absurdly hilarious!
Jackie, I LOVE audiobooks for many of the reasons you mention-the surprise of a new genre, not keeping track of time, and for me-visualizing the spoken word as it melds into the known references in the brain… sometimes I doodle and make notes while I listen and that’s my journal entry for the day. What a lovely page, prompting me to be grateful for audiobooks.
May I recommend Margaret Espaillat’s reading of Middlemarch on LibriVox. At first it seems like she reads really slow and with a lack of personality, but she actually does a fantastic job of navigating all the little tongue twister sentences and I find I’m able to really visualize (like you were saying above) everything as she’s reading, and it just makes it magical…as corny as that sounds 😉
And I’ll just throw it out there, while I’m in geeking out about audiobooks, Adrian Praetzellis’ reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is as good as it gets. That’s the one that changed my life!