I had grand plans of writing posts ahead to publish while I was away for the first night of Passover and visiting family, but then life and cleaning/packing/dashing around like crazy getting things ready happened, so here I am. If you celebrate, I hope you had a nice seder. I clink my matzah with you in solidarity. If you don't celebrate, I hope you have a great week of eating leavened products. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go here or here.
Here we go. Hold onto your hats - we're going to talk about books.
There are enough books on my to-read/already-bought shelf for me to not need to leave my house, but I like fiction, getting books from the library, and...I've discovered the zen and the bliss that is a well-chosen audiobook. Oh, shush, just hang on a minute. They're not just for listening to when you're in bed with the flu/mono/a terrible illness, or deeply bored in the car (as on the other occasions when I listened to Harry P over and over again). This time I listened to The Supremes at Earl's All You Can Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore just to try it out, and, in fact, genuinely enjoyed it.
Basic plot: Three best friends (Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean, also known as "The Supremes") spend every Sunday afternoon after church at Earl's All You Can Eat diner in Indiana, and have since high school. They deal with life's current challenges and think back about how they got where they are.
On a scale from 1 to Cripplingly Depressing: 1.5-2.
Memories from reading: I listened to this one on the train to and from volunteering, and while waiting for the train to arrive, and while cooking and making my lunch and washing dishes. Mostly I remember the fantastic voices of the narrators. The characters seemed larger than life, almost ridiculous at times, so comfortable with one another that they said and did things you can't do with anyone else.
Teeth-gnashing: At times the characters were a little too larger-than-life, and sometimes it got maudlin. Then again, life can be cooky, silly, and bizarre - and many books (for grown-ups) don't reflect that.
Weapon of Choice: Audiobook! I used an app on my phone called OverDrive. Pros: It was nice to be taken in by a story without staring at a screen or down at a page, which is how I spend a whole lot of my day. It was, surprisingly, soothing to listen to before bed - the app has a sleep timer, which you can set for any time from 5 minutes to around 2 hours. I loved the women who narrated and I loved the characters. Cons: It seemed like it took for-ev-er to get through a small piece of the book, and sometimes when I stopped the narration, I couldn't find the exact spot to begin again. At the same time, you could also have sped up the rate of speech and bookmarked, so...maybe I was just lazy/hadn't figured out how to work the app right. Sometimes character names and relationships, especially at the beginning (before I got used to the audiobook) were confusing, which I don't think would have happened had I read it the old-fashioned way.
Have you read any good books lately? Ever listened to an audiobook? Would you try one?
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