Thursday 18 October 2007

I've very little to talk about

I have been hard at work all day, transferring my precious collection into new storage. Unfortunately this has left me with very little to talk about as all I have been doing is putting tiny labels on things and moving them from one place to another. Quite tedious really.
One thing that has been keeping me entertained is audio books. So far I have ploughed my way through an Agatha Christie novel, Robinson Crusoe and some miscellaneous short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
At the moment I am tackling Treasure Island and it is a particularly humorous version. The site I download most of my books from is a provider of read texts for blind people (I should just point out that these where all recorded some 30 years ago and have now been made available to all on-line rather than me being some sort of opportunistic git) and relies on volunteers to do the reading. As many of the books are quite long they often just get people to do a few chapters rather than the entire thing so every now and then the reader changes. What I love is that they make no attempt to put similar sounding people together, or even categorise them by sex. Whilst everyone reading is American and usually from the south they have little else in common. The accents alone vary enormously. Treasure Island started off with a man reading it, who had a lovely baritone voice. I now have a woman from California reading the next few chapters who is a bit nasally and tends towards the higher pitches when excited.
I nearly fell off of my chair with laughter earlier when the switch over came. I love it. The books I download are all free (you won't believe how expense they can be!) but I think that I might be tempted to pay for these ones if I had to :)

No comments:

Post a Comment