My discovery of audiobooks is quite a recent one – it owes much, ironically to the emergence of Covid.
I was teaching from home at that time and a late afternoon hiatus in a much altered schedule persuaded me to venture out from Bukit Gombak for a walk. I really needed to get out. I was exhausted after about two kilometres but enjoyed it enough to repeat it.
In time, 1km became 10km+. I pretty much ploughed the same path from Bukit Gombak to Choa Chu Kang and back, which soon became a bit of a chore, even while listening to music.
The free audiobook presented itself as an easy and cheap solution; it’s in MP3 format like music so only a smartphone and earphones needed.
I’ve never looked back.
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So here I am three years later, six kilograms lighter, slightly tanned and the fittest I have been since I was a 30-year-old rugby player, despite a titanium knee!
I’ve long known that walking has benefits running doesn’t have- it’s easier on the knees for a start and as a retiree, I love long walks.
It’s also a real mood lifter: in retirement as in Covid, it’s possible to get a little stir crazy. Getting out can have a real zen effect for me.
On top of that, I would be greeted by familiar faces along the way – there’s a bakery in Sunshine Plaza that must miss me since I changed routes.
Lastly, recent research has also confirms walking’s many advantages- they are physical, mental and social- and the way it is said to counteract Alzheimer’s was an unexpected bonus. Getting older does not mean getting less fit.
Audiobooks the best company for long walks
With my long walks, I have been wonderfully rediscovering treasured texts from my youth through audiobooks. I might have grown old but these classics haven’t. The pleasure is still there. A return to the classics has reminded me why they are classics and worth another look.
Probably the best book I have listened to for sheer artistry, for inventiveness, for the pleasures of surprise, anticipation, suspense, moral value and social commentary must be Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. It is a mystery and is surprisingly modern in its portrayal of vulnerable women. In fact, many so-called old texts are surprisingly modern.
War of the Worlds is anti-colonial. Jane Eyre is feminist. Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde foregrounds the dangers of drugtaking. EM Forster’s The Machine Stops anticipates virtual reality and its possible consequence. We can still enjoy these books and even learn from them. That’s a wonderful fact to know.
As a Literature teacher of well over 40 years, I really should have known better.
The joys of audiobooks
Ironically, I used to consciously scorned audiobooks. Which voice could be as good as the one in my head? It turns out all of them, even the free ones.
I found lots on a website called LibriVox – the books are free because they are pre-20th century mostly- but that’s a good thing. The Victorian era is the golden age of the novels and many of them are written to be read aloud.
My first choice was H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and I was enthralled from the very start:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own… yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. (edited)
Listening to this and other favourites reminded me of many ways a good author keeps his reader reading.
The great stories always capture the reader from the start: my favourite come from Franz Kafka:
When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach.
On my walks I’ve been reacquainted with characters whose stories have resonated with me all my life – I’ve walked with Jane Eyre destitute across the moors and run across Dartmoor
with Sherlock Holmes. Quite recently at 68, I trembled once again with Jonathon Harker in Dracula’s castle, an event not experienced since I was 13.
The best thing is that the audiobook brings character to life – Dickens made sure you heard the dialect of Manchester or London. And you can hear the oily wickedness of Uriah Heep every time he asserts how “umble” he is.. And who can forger Micawber’s advice on personal economy that’s still so relevant?
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.
The audiobook brings character to full imaginative life. You can even hear the class divide when the gentlemen and the workingmen speak.
The expert author makes you hear the character as a wholely believable person. And the descriptions inform you exactly how you should relate to the people on the page.
So we are fascinated by the villains like Count Fosco in The Woman in White, a clear model for a Bond villain about 100 years later.
We admire the bravery of heroes like Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and his friends, the ingenuity of sleuths like Sherlock Homes and Hercule Poirot and feel the heavy weight of tragic loss in in novels like The Wide Sargasso Sea and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The well-chosen audiobook will always entertain, educate or inspire at any age.
How to get started on audiobooks
To get the best start on your audiobook journey, I feel it best to start with a familiar author. I started with Jack London. White Fang and The Call of the Wild are quite short, full of adventure and interesting characters with – what every reader wants – a satisfying ending.
Not all endings have to be happy ones of course: who could not relish the of choice of Sydney Carton at the end of A Tale of Two Cities or the end of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge? When I taught this text, the class cried.
The three very best books I would always recommend are:
- The War of the Worlds by Jules Verne. The best science fiction, it is grounded in the ordinary contemporary life of the time.
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Sometimes called the first detective story.
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. A remarkable window on the psychopathic mind.
Where to find audiobooks
There are two kinds of audiobook services: free and paid.
- Free services
First up is LibriVox. It downloads to computer or smartphone in MP3 form and consists of classic fiction from the 19th and early 20th century, and classic drama texts and poetry.
There are no ads and there are multiple versions of the same text, some dramatized, not just narrated. You’ll get Wilde, Dickens, Wells, the Brontes, Eliot along with some fondly remembered adventure novelists like R L Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and H Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Boroughs and Jack London. You can download to any device.
The second source of free audiobooks comes courtesy of the National Library Board. It provides an eclectic menu of fiction and non-fiction past and present. You are required to download an app called Libby. This app can be used on OS and android devices.
Oh, you can also find audiobooks on Youtube.
Other free audiobook services include:
- Paid services
Paid services all offer modern and contemporary books. Audible, Everand, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo Audiobooks and Spotify are the ones more frequently cited. Prices vary from US$7.95 to up to $149.50!
The audiobook subscription services have a variety of offers depending on the subscription category that suits you.
Do note how they price are different as well. For example, Spotify is a subscription PLUS the cost of the books. Google does not require a subscription and you just pay for each book you buy.
Here are some of the paid services:
I plan to get an Audible subscription; the 22 books in the Aubrey Maturin canon beckon (think of Russell Crowe in Master & Commander). I’ll probably ignore Harry Potter!
And I intend to branch out into podcasts! There’s a world apart from fiction and the world of science politics and history beckons. I’ve dipped my toe on Youtube and intend to swim a little further. A recent purchase of a hifi streamer with a built-in podcast channel is just begging to be exploited.
