I am a cheapskate!
I don’t like spending money when I don’t have to. That said, I’m know I’m “pennywise, pound-foolish”: I will find the cheapest apples (bruised and sour) and then buy lots and lots of them. In practice, it would usually be better to go for small amounts of quality and get more usable stuff, but hey … I’m a cheapskate.
My latest outbreak of penny-pinching is audio books. Because I now travel half way across the world by Tube to go to work each morning, I have time to read a good book.
Well, I have the time, but not the opportunity, as any traveller from London Bridge Underground station in the morning rush-hour will testify.
How can you hold a book, let alone read it, when the crush on the platform extends into the corridor and the tiny carriages are full to bursting. “There is a good service on the Northern Line,” my arse!
And physically reading is doubly hard now since I acquired my first pair of reading glasses!
Therefore, I have discovered the joy of audiobooks.
I got the first two by accident. My son had to read Silas Marner for his GCSEs and like any normal 15-year-old boy, the prospect didn’t appeal (too girly, probably). So we hit on the idea of downloading Silas to his generic mp3 player, read by Andrew Sachs (not in his Miguel voice, you understand).
Thing is, after having signed up to download this one book, we forgot about the subscription and began to accrue credits.
When we finally did get around to un-subbing, there were two FREE books available, so I downloaded Bill Bryson’s Short History of Almost Everything and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.
I have a physical copy of Bryson’s book which I’ve never got around to reading (it’s been sitting by the side of the bed for probably two years) and I’d be too embarrassed to be seen buying Brown’s latest tome.
And so I got hooked on audio books. So much so that despite technical difficulties in transferring the downloaded mp3s to my NON-iPod, I signed up again with audible.co.uk at a higher subscription rate: two books a month!
I’ve now “read” The Time-traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer, and Wetlands by by Charlotte Roche and Tim Mohr.
The latter is a horrifyingly compulsive yet scatological volume which I’ve also had in hardback since I read a review in The Metro on another train journey.
Actually, it’s just nice to be read to, although in the case of Wetlands it’s a bit like being abused by a potty-mouthed posh girl: I hear some people pay good money for that. It cost me just a £15 per month subscription!
Problem is, the books don’t last to the end of the month! I’ve run out of things to make my Tube ride go easier.
Now, there is the option to buy extra books from Audible, but if they’re not your monthly subscription you can pay more than £50 for your next unabridged fix.
So I Googled “free audio books” and found several classics of literature that will set you back at least seven quid a piece on Audible.
The first I downloaded was James Joyce’s Ulysses from librivox.org, a difficult task to read in print in your sitting room, let alone a crowded Tube train.
However, listening to the free audio book seems no easier: it is read by three earnest young men, accompanied by some bloke on the fiddle (for atmosphere, no doubt).
I gave up after 5 minutes, defeated by the thick West coast accents and unedited stumbles (I’m sure it wasn’t writted that way), and the undisguised sniggers over the word “gay”.
I then moved on to The War of the Worlds by HG Wells from AudioBooksForFree.com read, it seemed, by one of the Martians through his universal translator. Richard Burton is surely spinning in his grave.
It was the same story (forgive the pun) with the Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde and a History of the United States By Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard. Daleks don’t make good narrators.
Finally, I went back to a real, yet untrained voice for Our Island Story by H E Marshall, “a librivox.org recording by Kerra Schallenberg on May 9, 2006, in Oceanside, California” — you get told this at the beginning (and end) of EVERY chapter.
This 1906 children’s “history” of GREAT Britain does not sound quite right. After all, the book’s own “voice” is plummy Edwardian Middle Class, NOT South LA beach house. I keep expecting Ms Schallenberg to say: “yeah, right” or “for sure …”
So, I’m left in a quandary. Do I stick with the free hits and cringe or bite the bullet and shell out more cash to Audible?
Am I that much of a cheapskate?
Yeah, right!