Category: Fiction

Yesterday I blogged about my interest in audiobooks. This is an interest that has grown with time.

The Christmas I was considering a roadtrip to visit my kin in Texas, like the one I took last summer.

I didn’t end up going (good thing, too, as the weather was horrible), but while I was gearing up for the trip, I decided that I wanted to find a better way to listen to audiobooks while I was gone.

In particular: I didn’t like having to change CDs every hour. That’s a big pain if you’re doing ninety, whipping down the curvy, boulder-avoiding road through Texas Canyon in Arizona.

So I thought to myself: .mp3s of spoken word can be much smaller than ordinary CD files, and many new car stereos will play .mp3s, so here’s what I’ll do: I’ll get me one of the newer stereos for my pickup, then download a bunch of books on .mp3 from Audible.Com (which advertises your ability to listen to its books on portable devices), and I’ll be all set.

So I went down to Best Buy, bought a car stereo for like $130 that would play CDs, .mp3s, and Windows Media Player files, and had it installed the next day.

I was all set.

So I went ot Audible.Com to download some books and made a horrible discovery: Audible doesn’t let you download books in .mp3. They have a proprietary format that won’t play on my new player.

So I did a little research about what portable devices will play Audible files. It turns out: iPods can.

So I went out and got an iPod.

I also got a cheap broadcast device to let me play the iPod through my car stereo.

I haven’t actually set up the broadcast device yet, but barring another misfortune, I should be set.

VISIT AUDIBLE.COM.

LEARN MORE ABOUT .mp3s.

LEARN ABOUT iPODS.

READER A writes:

I’m a recent audible.com devotee, too, and await hearing about your experiences, Jimmy! Who’s your favorite author?

It took me awhile to get everything with audible set up (part of the problem was that their servers were overtaxed during Christmas). Thus far most of the audiobooks I’ve heard weren’t on audible.

Don’t know that I have a favorite author. My all-time favorite audio books are Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius The God (which are not for the faint of heart as they show ancient Rome in its glory and its cruelty). Unfortunately, these are only available in cassette at present (though, maddeningly, Audible used to have them, it appears).

Lately, I’ve been listening to Tom Clancy audiobooks. These sometimes have elements that I don’t like in them (e.g., rough language used by people in the midst of international crises), but in the main they’re quite entertaining.

Particularly freaky is the novel Executive Orders, where Jack Ryan has just become president in the wake of a 9/11 style attack (only far worse). The novel is amazingly similar in its general themes to what happened in 2000-2001: A disputed presidency, an airliner terrorist attack, and a biological attack, all in rapid succession. I hadn’t read this book at the time, but I found it totally creepy how well it thematically tracked recent history. People who had already read the novel were absolutely stunned when the events of 2000-2001 unfolded.

Most recently, I read the abridged audio version of his novel Red Rabbit, which is set in 1981 and in which a young Jack Ryan tries to stop the assassination attempt on John Paul II. You know he won’t ultimately stop the attack, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t save the pope’s life. As Ryan (like Clancy, I believe) is a Catholic, this was a really neat read. Non-Catholics may not be as interested in this one (in fact, many such folks didn’t like it since you know at least approximately how it will end), but seeing Jack Ryan woven into real history alongside John Paul II is a treat for me.

On my August trip, I audio-read Robert Ludlum’s Cassandra Compact, which I enjoyed.

Earlier, I audio-read Ken Follett’s retro-Cold War thriller (it’s set in the 1950s),
                        Code To Zero, which I really enjoyed.

On the other hand, I absolutely hated John Le Carre’s Absolute Friends. I seriously thought about asking for my money back. After suffering through the novel hoping against progressively dimmer hope that it’s going to get better, it ends in an absolutely viciously anti-American screed.

READER B writes:

I might point out to you that on your cross-country adventures you
can rent an audiobook at a Cracker Barrel and return it a week later to
any other Cracker Barrel in the country.

Thanks!

Actually, on my August trip I noticed lots of seemingly rental copies of audiobooks at places I stopped. I assumed they were only for rent to locals, but apparently not. Next time, I may pick up one!

READER C writes:

I’ve never tried one of these audio book thingies.

How "abridged" are the abridged versions.  Are they worth your while?

It depends on what the publisher wants. Thus far, I haven’t had a problem with them. Typically the Tom Clancy novel’s I’ve listened to are about 5 CDs (6 hours) long, which is maybe half what the original novel is.

I’ve actually run into people online saying that they like the abridged versions better, because when you’re abridging a novel the first thing you cut out are the non-essential, slower, less-interesting parts.

Apparently, Clancy has a tendency to include informative but non-plot-advancing material in his novels (e.g., how military agencies work, etc.) that some people prefer to have left out so they can focus on the story.

I’ve never read an unabridged Tom Clancy novel, but I’m planning to. I was so pleased with Red Rabbit (noted above) that I plant to download the unabridged version from Audible.Com and have a listen to the whole thing.

The next few days I’m going to be doing a few posts (in addition to other posts) about one of my interests that I haven’t really blogged about before: audiobooks.

For those who may not be aware, an audiobook is simply a book (either unabridged or abridged) that someone has recorded outloud, either to tape, CD, .mp3, or what have you.

I got into audiobooks a few years ago when I discovered that, after so many hours of squinting at print on a screen or on a page, I really enjoyed simply relaxing and letting someone else read to me for a change.

I especially like to listen to audiobooks when I’m travelling. It’s nice to plug in a CD and let the miles roll by.

You can get all kinds of audiobooks, from quite a long while ago (the Bible, the Illiad, the Odessy), to 19th century (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Fin, the works of Edgar Allen Poe), to twentieth century (I, Claudius, Claudius the God), to the latest bestsellers (Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton’s latest).

At first, I would purchase audiobooks, as one can do from Amazon.Com or in a bookstore, but this tends to have a problem associated with it: Such audiobooks are often expensive–more expensive than hardbacks.

Another solution is to get them from a service like Blackstone Audiobooks, where you can rent them rather than buy them.

More recently, I have been enjoying downloading digital audiobooks from Audible.Com, where you can download them (in a proprietary format) quite inexpensively.

The next few days, I’ll tell you more about ways you can get, use, and even make (!) your own audiobooks.

(ANTI-SPOILER REQUEST: For those who are already into audiobooks, I’d ask you not to spoil some of the neat hi-tech things I’m about to introduce. Kindly wait till I mention a method and then mention your neat-o variation on it. E.g., for this post you might talk about your experience with conventional audiobooks and with services like the ones named above. Much obliged!)

Okay, I’m listening to a story that H.P. Lovecraft ghostwrote (an appropriate thing for a horror writer) that is called The Mound.

One of the things I like about Lovecraft is the way he uses language. He had a real way with words and a phenomenal number of words in his active vocabulary.

But in this story, he makes a slip.

At one point, the narrator writes:

That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among the villagers.

Where might this "village" be? The Swiss alps? The island of Borneo? The sleepy hillsides of New England? They certainly have villages in all of those places, but they don’t where Lovecraft’s story is set:

Western Oklahoma.

Nobody in that part of the country talks about towns, however small, as "villages," nor describes their occupants as "villagers." In the dialect common in those parts, the proper, polite term is "town," and the proper way to speak of the inhabitants is "townsfolk." (Less polite terms are also available if you don’t set much stock by the town and its inhabitants.)

I suppose an exception would be made for "Indian villages" in the area, but then the inhabitants wouldn’t be called "villagers" but simply "Indians" (at least in 1928, when the story is set). But that’s not the kind of "village" he’s talking about.

In fairness to Lovecraft, his narrator is from the East and so is apt to describe things as an easterner would, but if he was really having a conversation with a local family about what legends were common among the townsfolk then they would likely have used the word "townsfolk" (or "townspeople" or something of this nature) and it should have ended up in the narrator’s narrative.

In any event, the detail rang false for me.

It’s very hard to imitate the idiom of another region and not get spotted by natives of the area (myself, in this case). I would never be able to fake Lovecraft’s New England setting and idiom.

So, if I ever write horror stories set in the present day, I guess they’ll have to be set in the South or Southwest.

UPDATE: I finished The Mound, and toward the end of the story it is revealed that the narrator is a Virginian. So: Unless they have "villages" in Virginia (and so far as I know, they don’t), what we have here is a flat-out mistake on Lovecraft’s part, letting his native New England idiom intrude onto a story about the South. He ain’t from around these parts, I reckon.

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

GET THE STORY.

GET THE STORY.

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.

One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.

I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:

Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.

So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:

BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.

One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.

I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:

Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.

So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:

BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!