Audiobooks

I learned to love audiobooks from my parents.  When I was little, they owned a collection of radio dramas on tape which they may have had since before I was born, most of which I believe were produced by a company called The Mind's Eye.  I can't find most of these online, but I remember what the covers of the tapes looked like and most matched.

The Hobbit, definitely the Mind's Eye, came out in 1979.

The Wind in the Willows

Emma

The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Adventure of the Six Napoleons

There may have been more but those are all I can remember at the moment.  

I believe the actor who did Toad's voice also did the voice of Stapleton, which I found cool but distracting.  I think there was more actor overlap as well.

Anyway I absolutely loved these tapes.  I literally wore the Hobbit out.  I can still here the voices of the narrator and the actors when I read those books and stories.   Just as I listen to audiobooks while cleaning the house today,  I would listen to them while I cleaned my room, which is probably something I learned from my father.

My father is an addictive audiobook listener, and he does it primarily when he does housework, when he drives and when he does "projects" - which for him includes a range of activities including home improvement, construction, carpentry, art, and arts and crafts.  I think maybe he first really got into listening to books on tape at the same time he got into counted cross stitch, sometime in the early eighties when I was a small child, and boy are these two activities certainly made for each other.  He probably discovered that he could get books on tape from the public library, of which he was an avid customer.   He was big into putting books and books on tape "on hold" - the primary advantage being that they would ship the books from other libraries in the system to your local library, so you had a wider selection of what you could get, and you could preselect using the computerized card catalogue.  I think there was a limit to how many books on tape you could have out at a time, so he had a careful system of finishing a book on tape just in time to turn in and pick up the on waiting; this often involved listening to the end of a story sitting in the car in the library parking lot.  

All or most of the books on tape in the library system were produced by Recorded Books, the best of the audiobook companies, still in business today.  All their books are unabridged - my father, like me, will not abide an abridged book on tape -- and they employed the man who is commonly recognized as the greatest audiobook narrator of all time, as well as being my father's favorite, Frank Muller.   (Muller was in a motorcycle accident in 2001 and was so severely injured that he stopped narrating; he died in 2008.)  

My dad primarly used a walkman for listening to the books on tape and was constantly wearing them out; as he discovered, the tape for a book on tape has much longer tape on it than a musical tape and will more quickly kill the motor on a cassette player.  I can remember him often having to take a tape itself apart, tiny screws and all, to fix the tape itself when it got stuck or tangled. He seems like the only man in the world who have attempted this - with a tape owned by the library, no less-- much less succeeded, which he always did.  He would even use a walkman while driving, which drove my mother crazy; I think he may have been pulled over for it by the local cops more than once.  (My father was frequently pulled over the by the cops when I was a kid for various reasons, usually speeding, but never so far as I know got a ticket; he had a gift for dealing with policemen.)  My mother also insists that the constant walkman use caused him to suffer permanent hearing loss and she would nag him about it.  I think she eventually succeeded in getting him to switch to a boombox and the car cassette player most of the time.  

So I'm sure I got the idea from him, and maybe because I'm his daughter and we have extremely similar personalities, I too obsessively listen to audiobooks.  Actually I don't understand why everybody doesn't; it turns the drudgery of long car trips, the commute to work, and housework into pleasure, and also, I think there are few pleasures greater, if any, than being read to.  When I was in college, I would listen to books on tape when I cleaned my tiny dorm room; in the Peace Corps I would listen to the very occasional one I could get my hands on when washing our clothes by hand.  When Nate and I got back to America and moved into our first apartment, we were across the street from Beatley, Alexandria, Virginia's central public library, so I was able to rent books on tape easily - by that time they had become books on CD.  I don't think I used the CD walkman from my teenagerhood much; I switched to a small CD walkman Nate bought me, and we had a CD player in our car (a wedding present from a friend who worked at Crutchfield, and we received few better).   Then we moved to D.C. and I signed up to get audiobooks through the mail from Recorded Books.  I started with the two a month plan but that proved grossly inadequate so I switched to four-at-a-time.   Now that era, too, is at an end; I finally have an iphone, the sleak modern version of my father's walkman; there is no tiny motor, no yards of tape for it to turn.  I'm cancelling my account with Recorded Books in favor of getting my audiobooks in MP3 format from audible.com.  No more finishing the story in the parking lot of the post office.   There are two drawbacks; audible books are still a bit expensive for my taste, although the selection is magnificent and the books are always at hand; and boy, that iphone doesn't hold its charge.