Reading on the road
For my commuteI cannot root.
The bumpy roads
in disrepute.
And everyone
on the same route.
The carpool lane:
forbidden fruit.
See how literary I've become, now that I listen to books on CD in the car? This is the best way I've found to pass time on the clogged freeways. I'm currently going through every disc offered by the Palo Alto and Menlo Park libraries -- they can be a little scratchy, but you can't beat the price. Is anyone else as addicted as I am?
Sometimes I choose a book just because I like the person reading it. Is that like seeing a play because of its innovative use of spike tape? Well, I may be an off-the-market broad, but I think George Guidall has a dreamy voice.
A few recent reads and humble opinions:
- "The Night Watch" by Sarah Waters. An intricate tale of young people in 1940s London. Sometimes improbable how all their lives intersected, but the characters were so real that I could forgive that. Plus, ever since I was in "Merrily We Roll Along" I've loved stories told in reverse chronological order.
- "The Jane Austen Book Club" by Karen Joy Fowler. I was a total sucker for this. Light and sometimes silly, but a sweet camaraderie among the book-club members. Kudos for adding a male member of the club, too.
- "Seizure" by Robin Cook. This was so ridiculously bad: overwrought, dialogue as cliched as a bad penny, laughable ending. Oh, George, even you couldn't save it.
Photo by Kenn Kiser (from morgueFile.com)
posted by Rebecca at
5:47 PM
2 Comments:
I think listening to a skilled actor read a Shakespeare play or a Homeric poem is the way we should be exposed to such works if a live performance isn't available.
In reading Shakespeare to oneself, given the embedded challenge of the diction, how do you know where an actor would put emotion?
Here's a passage from Henry V, Act 2 Scene 2, in which Henry is about to unmask three traitors. Anyone who knows the story will sense Henry's iron fist within the velvet glove of his greeting, but that is not clear in the writing. His sarcasm must be articulated.
"My Lord of Cambridge, and my kind Lord of Masham, and you, my gentle knight, give me your thoughts: Think you not that the powers we bear with us will cut their passage through the force of France, doing the execution and the act for which we have in head assembled them"?
By
A wise man from Menlo Park, at 11:03 AM
We travel full time (as in all across the US in an RV) and love books on tape. We also burn podcasts on CD so we can listen to those too. That's how we studied Japanese before taking a trip there. And recently our 16 year old son has taken to reading to Mom and Dad (nice switch!)
By
Goza Family (a.k.a. The Act!vated Storytellers), at 6:42 PM
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