A Literary Life

Tidbit No. 29

How did people ever complete home improvement tasks without MP3 players? I honestly don’t know. I suppose you could turn on the radio or stereo, and let your own thoughts fill your head. But why concoct your own thoughts when someone else could do it for you — via great podcasts, radio rebroadcasts and more pumped directly into your ear canal? (I’m sure they’re working on the directly into your prefrontal cortex option, perhaps in time for the Christmas season.)

I ask because I spent at least 16 hours of the last two days painting trim, which anyone who has attempted such a thing knows is the third circle of hell. (Dante rented, so he wasn’t aware.) That’s a lot of iPod time.

And I ran out of my normal podcasts (including This American Life, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Radiolab, To the Best of Our Knowledge, the Bryant Park Project and few others). And although music is great, I’ve become accustomed to having voices in my head ears. Long story short, I finally broke down and signed up to try a service many I know have been raving about for years: Audible.com. It’s $7.95 a month for the first three months (one book per month) and you can cancel at any time, so I figured it was worth a shot.

So what does one want in an audio book? I pondered. On the front page, there were many books I had on my to-read list, including the new David Sedaris and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. They also had some of the non-fiction books I’d been recommended, like Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA. But the first two I knew had language I wanted to savor, and the last would probably need the parts of my brain engaged in painting if I wanted it to be more than noise. So I went for my version of brain candy: fun, fast-moving historical fiction.

I took the No. 1 most popular book in the category: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. What the hell? It was No. 1. And it had a bonus. Where for my one credit I could have gotten 9 hours of David Sedaris, with Follett I received about 50. That’s right. Fifty hours of voices in my head, telling the epic stories of the everyday men and women constructing a cathedral in 12th century England.And by the end of the day painting, I’d already gotten through five of those hours, or 10 percent of the book, and found it to be exactly what I’d been craving. The story is light, engrossing and fun, using just enough of my brain to allow my hands to move in their repetitive tasks. For instance, here’s an excerpt of the back story of my favorite character thus far, Ellen:

Her father had been a knight, she told them; a big, strong, violent man who wanted sons with whom he could ride and hunt and wrestle, companions to drink and carouse into the night with him. In these matters he was as unlucky as a man could be, for he got Ellen … (She) grew up in what was almost an all-male household. She cut her hair short and carried a dagger, and learned not to play with kittens or care for blind old dogs. By the time she was Martha’s age she could spit on the ground and eat apple cores and kick a horse in the belly so hard that it would draw in its breath, allowing her to tighten its girth one more notch. She knew that all men who were not part of her father’s band were called cocksuckers and all women who would not go with them were called pigfuckers, although she was not quite sure — and did not much care — what these insults really meant.

It’s such great entertainment, I’m almost considering going around the house looking for other physical things to do so I can continue listening. Almost, of course. But considering that I now have an amount of entertainment exceeding the hours in a full-time work week, I think my home-improvement tasks will be a bit easier for a while to come.

Tidbits |