I have been in a book club (The Best Book Club Ever!) since August 2010. I have always been very good at buying books, but not so good at reading and finishing them. The BBCE! has changed that for me.
I have been busy taking Personal Financial Planning classes at UCLA Extension the past couple years. I enjoy the challenge, but did not realize how time consuming the courses would be. Reading a 900-page textbook in 12 weeks is not an easy task. So for BBCE! I started "cheating" by listening to some selections on audio books. I figured it wasn't really cheating if the book was unabridged.
I enjoyed Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible" on audio. I had read it several years ago, so I thought an audio listen would be okay. One narrator doing five southern accents gets on one's nerves after disk 8 but I don't think the book lost any impact in translation.
Around this time, Border's Books shut down, limiting my book buying options. A tragic moment in book history.
Our next book, "The Lost City of Z" by David Grann, was a true, gripping account of '20s explorer Percy Fawcett who was obsessed with finding a city in the Amazon. I realized I was missing out on intricate maps and pictures of Fawcett and his crew by being exposed only to the audio book.
I finally broke down and bought a Kindle Fire for our next selection, "A Wild Sheep Chase," by Haruki Murakami. I was thrilled by how easy it was to download the book from Amazon. I greedily downloaded several free public domain books too for my portable library. After carting my 10lb textbook around I was giddy.
But a funny thing happened at BBCE! with this book. There is one section of the book where a character talks inrunonsentenceslike this. I was sure my Kindle was messed up and I was a little pissed. I checked by friend's hard copy and saw that was indeed intentional. The Power of Print, example one. Another friend listened to the audio, so she didn't experience this at all! She also missed out on the one random strange drawing in the book. We all had different experiences reading that book via hard copy, ebook and audio.
What else is being lost in the translations between the printed page, the audio book and ebook? Are you getting the full story?
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