Tolkien's reading an exciting from Lord of the, Rings, while Ernest Hemingway waits. offstage. Dylan Thomas t reading Do Not Go That Good Night: he into his syllables, and overlays it all with just the right of Irish burr.
I dismiss Jeanine `Don't Imall Stuff' Garofalo hack a whole chunk of Seamus Heaney on Seamus Heaney istead. Malachy McCourt lines up beside waiting to perform a section from last year's autobiographical bestseller. A Monk Swimming Churchill glowers at being upstaged, much, I imagine, as he did in that famous portrain by Karsh.
This was no dream evening with the stars of my literary firmament: just the realisation that at last, technology had something to offer the likes of me. Audiobooks leave me cold tapes rob you of the ability to flip back and forth, to listen to the author's voice rather than the voice of an accomplished actor. MP3 as a technology is exciting, but in practice the legal sites offer a mishmash of contemporary pop and rock that doesn't really do it for me. (We'll leave the illegal sites out of this column, okay?)
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But while I don't like books being read to me, I do find listening to an author interesting: I scan their verbal idiosyncrasies. the way autograph-hunters scan loops and whorls for meaning. It's great when an author turns out to be a good reader, too, but not always the case. T S Eliot and Rabindranath Tagore both had drawbacks: Tagore had a highpitched voice, Eliot a dryness the oral rendering of The Waste Land.
But until MP3lit.com came along, I had no idea what I was missing. This site offers book junkies the opportunity to sample free, legal snippets from author readings. The snippets are just the right size - 5 to 10 minutes worth of playing time, or a half hour/45 minute download in MP3 format on a middling fast connection. They allow you to connect, briefly, with the person behind the mask though they're restricted to chiefly Western authors at present.
The results are surprising. Sylvia Plath has a resonant, strong voice; only the cadences hint at the emotional fragility that would later drive her to suicide. Hemingway, recordipg as a war correspondence, has an edgy voice that sucks you into the clipped rhythms of his prose. Tolkien reads dramatically and does such a wonderful job of bringing Gollum's creepiness to life that you realise just how alive his characters were to him. Elmore l.eonard is pure Florida noir with a twist of irony; Malachy McCourt tells his anecdotes like a seasoned raconteur chilling out at the bar.
There's something about the purity of voice, of an author addressing his reader directly, that makes you understand why we crave contact with authors as well as with their books. As we move into the upper half of the 20th century, the readings become slicker, more rehearsed. They're polished performances that make you think irresistibly of auditoria and microphones, of authors whose rough edges have been sandpapered by a hundred book tours. The earlier recordings are more personal, giving you a sense of listening to an author who's in your living room.
The growing collection at MP3lit.com is unmatched by any other MP3 site I've come across, but it iias one notable exception: Irvine Welsh, author of Tyainspotting and Filth. This is disappointing; since Welsh's book tours tend to be one-off experiences. His preparation for the event involves popping substances that are usually mindaltering and definitely illegal. He once persuaded his fellow authors on the tour to join in. The resulting book reading was unforgettable, even if you wanted to forget, and unadulterated Welsh.
As I bypass Richard Ford and Joyce Carol Oates in favour of something more exciting, I see a listing for Nabokov. Is it the real MeCoy or a suave pretender? In the moment before the page loads, I catch myself praying that it will be him. And that he'll somehow, impossibly, be captured reciting not a passage from his works, but the sentence that sums up the lives of all authors: "It's a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot." It's not likely: even MP3lit.com has its limits.
Email: nilroy@mailcity.com