I woke up this morning at 5am feeling terrible – burning throat, stopped up ears – and knew that there was no way I could survive a day at the office. And I couldn’t give anyone else my crud so I valiantly chose to stay home and let my body recover from this “ick” that plagues me.
But in deciding to stay home I took the advice of my friend Meg (aheartnny.blogspot.com) and took a chance on Audible.com. Now, I had actually signed up yesterday when I realized I had nothing to enjoy on my iPhone while I participated in the NYC Pancreatic Cancer Research walk. So, while sitting by the river I signed up for Audible and decided I would finally join in on The Hunger Games like all of my friends have been doing (or finished) over the last few months. Unfortunately the river didn’t provide WiFi access and the audiobook was over the 20MB limit over the 3G network so, with time to kill before the walk began, I trudged up the hill and back to Broadway where I found a McDonald’s and hopped onto their WiFi service.
Now, if you’ve ever tried to use a public WiFi service, it can be like trying to walk through a pool of molasses. Slow, cumbersome and exhausting. I could have written the book out long-hand before the download completed and I didn’t have THAT much time before the walk… so I gave up, climbed back down the hill and waited for the event to begin without the audiobook to keep me company.
But, after the walk, I hurried home and used my personal WiFi to connect to the Audible store and got my book in seconds. Zip!
I spent part of the afternoon listening intently to the The Hunger Games unfold. I’ve only listened to a few audiobooks before, and never on my phone or any other MP3 player. In fact, the last audiobook I remember listening to was on a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach back in 1993. The book, Sleeping Beauty by A. N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice’s pseudonym for the raunchy fantasy tale). Trust me, listening to someone read aloud the erotic, and often gag-inducing, story is enough to put you off of audiobooks for 18 years (Jeez… 18 years?? Seriously??)
But Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is pretty spectacular. A little slow to start and read, with not quite the enthusiam I’d hoped for, by Carolyn McCormick, the book is nonetheless intriguing in its first-person narrative of the events surrounding a future vision of our world where children are pitted against each other in battles to the death by a government that hopes to squash any resistance through barbaric intimidation attempts.
I’m only on the third chapter but I can see that this won’t tag very long. I’ll do a more comprehensive review once I’m finished but so far “two thumbs up”.
Try Audible if you haven’t. Living in NYC I can see, as Meg suggested, the benefits of a long subway ride while enjoying the story while the narrator drowns out the surrounding noise.
Tommy Karr 