Audiobooks

Slate has an article on audiobooks today. It starts out with this bit of information that I didn't know, about the increasing popularity of audiobooks:

Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves.

I started listening to audiobooks hardcore about 7-8 years ago, when I lived in Dallas and had a 30-40 minute commute each way to and from work, and figured I'd give it a try. Now that's all I listen to when I'm in my car, and I figure I can normally read anywhere from 5-10 more books a year by listening to them.

The article gives an overview of the history of the industry, though I don't know how you can mention Scott Brick and not mention Frank Muller, who is probably the single most famous audiobook reader, having recorded over 200 books.

The article also points out the obvious, that the person who reads the audiobook generally makes or breaks it. This is why it's best for someone wading into audiobooks for the first time to check their local library or see if you can find samples online. Audiobooks are expensive (generally in the $50 price range), and it's a risky gamble if the reader turns out to suck.

The article praises the reading of the Pullman trilogy, though I wasn't that impressed. I thought the guy who read the part of the bear sounded brain-damaged, not bear-like. There are some interesting clips of celebrity readers, who have taken more to reading as the industry has become more popular.

Here's a hilarious clip of Brad Pitt butchering Spanish as he reads Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.

But there are some very good books read by some very good readers out there. Here are a few recommendations off the top of my head:

Einstein read by Edward Hermann
I finished this not too long ago, and though it's long, it was a great read

Anything read by Frank Muller.
I listened to a lot of Stephen King's stuff (e.g. the first four Dark Tower books) read by Muller, as well as Call of the Wild, 1984, and probably some things I can't remember now. I admit I thought he sounded a little hammy at first, but he grows on pretty fast.

Veteran British actor Roy Dotrice did an outstanding job with the first three volumes of George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Fire and Ice. Unfortunately, I think they were only ever released on cassette. Amazon's availability looks pretty poor. If they haven't, they really need to re-release these on CD or via download. Dotrice really brings these books to life.

William Hurt and Stephen King tag-team the reading of King's Hearts in Atlantis, and do a great job.

And I could have sworn at one time I had listened to an unabridged production of Carter Beats the Devil read by Stanley Tucci, although Amazon has a different reader for the unabridged version. Even if it was abridged, this one sticks out in my memory as one of the best read audiobooks I ever listened to, so it's worth it, even though I normally despise abridgments.

And if you think audiobooks are a weird or unnatural way to experience a story, just keep in mind that the oral tradition of storytelling has been the norm for thousands of years of human history. The phenomenon of storytellers writing their stories down, having them printed, and then read silently in isolation by their audience is a recent innovation, and is the exception in human history. Listening to books is a great way to read them, so you should give it a try if you haven't already.

The Audacity of Hope

Sorry for the delinquency in posting lately...a lot of things have been going on.

Anyway, I'm currently reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope on audiobook right now (read by Obama). I avoided it for a while because I thought the title was schmalzty, and I thought it would be a preachy, mushy-headed plea for change and optimism in American politics.

Turns out it's actually pretty good, and the content surprised me. It's one part interesting civics lesson, one part a biography of Obama's political history, and one part policy proposals for improving America. And it's good. Sometimes I get the sense that he's telling me what I want to hear, and sometimes I wonder the extent to which the words are his own, but more often I find that he seems honest, articulate, and engaging.

Obama is unapologetic as he describes his liberal views, but talks about how the political climate has become more polarized and less substantive, and about how this is harmful to the political process and ultimately to the American citizen. I did wonder about this thesis, though. Obama taught law, and seems to know a lot about American history. But he never really convinces me that politics haven't always been extremely polarized, and that there's anything really different about the current climate. Any student of history could probably make a convincing case that politics in Washington were just as full of fluff and rancor 100 years ago as they are today, if not more so.

His actual policy proposals are a mixed bag. He remains in a maddening valley between vague and specific. Some proposals I like, such as increasing salaries for teachers and funding for basic science, but such things cost money and he never talks about cutting any other programs (at least that I've seen, and I'm about 3/4 of the way through the book). Other specifics seem silly, such as his energy policy. He wants "real funding" for alternative energy sources, proposing that 1% of oil company revenue be used to research alternative fuels. Why exactly should a particular industry be forced by the government to fund research that would replace the core of their business model?

Obama is best when he's talking about his personal history in politics, from his various state and national Senate races to his swearing in and personal interactions with other politicians, such as President Bush. He talks about how he disagrees strongly with Bush's policies, but still finds him a likable man who honestly thinks he's doing what he thinks is best for the country.

Throughout the book, Obama reiterates the message that both liberals and conservatives have become increasingly polarized by their dogmatism, and he repeatedly urges politicians and citizens to focus on substance and look at both political candidates and policy decisions in their totality, rather than vilifying them in a reactionary way. And on that point, his message certainly does resonate.

Even though it is a mixed bag and I'm still cautious about how authentic Obama is, I'd recommend the book, and based on reading it, I'd be more likely to vote for him in the Fall.

The Digital Plague

While on my trip to DC, I finished reading Jeff Somers follow up to The Electric Church, called The Digital Plague.

It's got the same main character, a hired killer named Avery Cates, set in a cyberpunk dystopian future. I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the first one, though it was still quite good. They're written in first-person, which is done well. But what keeps the narrative really chugging along is that Somers writes relatively short chapters in a serial cliffhanger style. At the end of each chapter, either someone's about to die, or some twist is revealed. It's a nice style that makes the book read very quickly and makes it feel fast-paced.


The first book concerned the efforts to forcibly convert everyone in the world to become members of The Electric Church by kidnapping them and forcibly implanting their consciousnesses into monks, which are souped-up droids. Cates thought he executed the leader of the church, and earned a huge payday as well. In this second book, he's intentially infected with a plague made from tiny robots, that spreads rapidly and likes to chew people up from the inside. The book is well-written, tightly-paced, and filled with interesting characters. At times I had issues with the description of action, but I cut the author some slack...it's difficult to describe convoluted actions scenes.

So overall Plague is a nice complement to the previous book, and it's nice to see that the series apparently has legs...an excerpt for the next book, The Eternal Prison, is included in the back of this latest book.

Why Two Things Never Really Happen at the Same Time

I'm still reading and enjoying Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein. He hasn't yet gotten to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and Einstein's famous quotation "God does not play dice", but you can see some foreshadowing of why he might find it so distasteful.

In describing Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, Isaacson uses the following example (let's see if I get this right...if you're interested in the subject you should definitely browse around and make sure I didn't screw up this explanation). Let's say Joe is standing at point X when two lightning bolts strike at A and B:










The light from both strikes reaches Joe at precisely the same time, so he perceives the events as occurring simultaneously. So we can safely say that lightning struck the two places simultaneously, right?

Wrong.

Bob is traveling at a very high, constant velocity toward point X. He is directly on X when the lightning strikes occur. However, the light from the lightning strike at A will reach him sooner than the light from lightning strike B because of his motion toward A and away from B. So from his frame of reference, the lightning will strike A slightly before it will strike B.

Thus, there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity. You can only describe two things happening at once in relative terms. What determines whether two things happen at the same time depends on how fast an observer (or measurement device) is traveling relative to them.

I think I got that right.

And I think this is part of the reason why Einstein had such a problem with "spooky action at a distance", the idea that two particles that are entangled could affect one another simultaneously regardless of how far apart they were. As far as I understand, this phenomenon has been tested in the lab, at very short distances, but there are criticisms. However, if two particles were entangled, and one stayed on earth while the other was transported to the moon, and then the spin of one was modified and it affected the spin of the other...that would certainly be strong evidence.

I'm looking forward to Isaacson's account of Einstein and quantum mechanics.

Carl Sagan on Recognizing Truth

I thumbed through a copy of Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience in the bookstore yesterday (it's also on my Amazon wish list).

I pretty quickly flipped to the back of the book, where they had included some transcriptions of questions that people had asked Sagan when he'd delivered the speeches in the book. There's lots of good stuff there, but I particularly liked this exchange:

Questioner: How do you recognize the truth when it is upon us?

Carl Sagan: A simple question: How can we recognize the truth? It is, of course, difficult. But there are a few simple rules. The truth ought to be logically consistent. It should not contradict itself; that is, there are some logical criteria. It ought to be consistent with what else we know. That is an additional way in which miracles run into trouble. We know a great many things--a tiny fraction, to be sure, of the universe, a pitifully tiny fraction. But nevertheless some things we know with quite high reliability. So where we are asking about truth, we ought to be sure that it's not inconsistent with what else we know. We should also pay attention to how badly we want to believe a given contention. The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be. It involves a kind of courageous self-discipline. Nobody says it's easy. I think those three principles at least will winnow out a fair amount of chaff. It doesn't guarantee that what remains is true, but at least it will significantly diminish the field of discourse.

Ah, it's too bad Sagan is dead. He was one of the clearest voices of reason.

To summarize...three general guidelines from distinguishing truth from hooey:

• Check for internal consistency
  
• Check for external consistency (does it jive with the best available knowledge?)
  
• Be as unbiased as possible
  

This is sort of a truncated version of Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit from A Demon-Haunted World, and it's a nice summary.