Voices in my head.
As careful readers will know, I’m something of an audiobook fiend. This all started when I had a 40-mile one-way commute. Said commute involved the Capital Beltway, and a bridge. If you live in the area, you know what this means. If you don’t live in the area, just take my word for the following: traffic sucked, and was the sort of make one seriously consider driving off the side of the bridge, just to get away from it. So, audiobooks helped me keep my sanity (such as it is).
Now, I clearly no longer have long commutes. Most days, I get up and head down 3 half-flights of stairs to my craft room / office in the basement. My car sits idle more days than it gets to tool around on the road. But, my love of audiobooks continues. I listen to them while I knit, or while I work on layout that doesn’t require paying attention to words. (When I work on layout that requires paying attention to words, I tend to zone out on the audiobook itself.)
I get the vast majority of my audiobooks from Audible, as I have for years. The addition of their Whispersync for Voice feature (thanks to being purchased by Amazon) makes me an even more devoted Audible fan. (This feature automatically syncs up your position between your audiobook and your Kindle ebook, letting you switch back and forth between the mediums more or less painlessly. It’s awesome.)
I just finished my latest listen (Under the Dome, by Stephen King (more on that in another post)
This inevitably lead me to ponder who I would love to listen to narrating audiobooks. James Earl Jones (already there, mostly children’s books and books of a biblical nature). Morgan Freeman (again, already there, but mostly interviews and a couple of short stories). Ian McKellan (a bunch of Shakespeare, and The Odyssey). Patrick Stewart (The Last Battle). Kevin Spacey (interviews).
It looks like my listening list is getting padded out.
Who would you love to listen to read to you? What works would you want them to read? Who would you hate to have to listen to? Would it matter at all what they were reading? (For instance, Gilbert Godfried’s voice drives me absolutely insane, but he does have two redeeming roles: The parrot from Aladdin, and the AFLAC duck (before he screwed up that gig for himself).