Audiobooks for teh win!
So. As I’ve said before, I don’t read anymore. At all. ‘Teh internets’ came in the nineteen hundred and nineties but in ’03 or so I discovered broadband and tabbed browsing with the Opera Browser and my attention span was forever fucked.
Now, I don’t open a new web page with my coffee in the morning, I open a session. Thats right. About 25 tabs in all, which I flit between and use the Cmd+Shift+Click shortcut many, many times to ‘Open New Tab in Background’ so by the time I’m halfway through my coffee, I’ve got about fifty tabs open. So what does this have to do with my reading habits? Lots. Tabbed browsing has reduced my attention span to a few seconds, a minute at best. It’s pathetic really.
As a child and a young adult (hate the term) I would regularly read at least five books a month. I’m not boasting, other kids my age were getting to second base while I was reading Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra for the third time. <hangs head> Its true..
Nowadays I have a really hard time even getting through a leaflet or those BS little ‘Nutritional Facts’ tables on the back of bags of chips. I don’t need a table to tell me what the nutritional value of a bag of artificially coloured, artificially flavoured chips is! ZERO! That’s the nutritional value!
Anyways I just went off on a tangent there as I am wont to do these days but that just illustrates the point I am trying to make.
So. Quickly. Before someone jangles a set of keys in front of me and I go all “Oooh! Shineee!”
My Attention Span: Fucked.
AudioBooks though: Good.
Somehow the only way I can really ‘read’ now is with an audiobook. It takes a bit of getting used to and it has it’s drawbacks but when your back starts hurting just as you get to chapter two its time to give an audiobook a try.
So. Here’s a list of four great audiobooks (with links) that I’ve just finished ‘reading’, am almost through or have just started. I can’t even read a book at time now. I have to be reading at least two. But I digress…
Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook
Dilbert creator, Scott Adams’ hysterically funny management book. Even if you are like me and love the Dibert comic strip but hate the animated television show you will like this book. Scratch that, You’ll love it. Click the image for the MP3.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
I had never heard of this David Sedaris until a close friend who was also my room-mate at college for two years told me that he was reading this book and the author reminded him of me. So I got the book and started reading/listening to it and felt really pleased with myself as I noted the author’s understated and extremely dry sense of humour. Imagine my horror then, when I slowly realised that David Sedaris was/is GAY. Yeah. Thanks a TON Ashutosh Kar.
Anyway. A collection of short stories. Read by the author in a deadpan voice that just adds to the brilliance of the book. Click the image for a torrent link. I know it isn’t as easy as downloading an MP3 but this is 2009, so get with the program son!
I Am America (And So Can You!)
Stephen Colbert is most famous for his show ‘The Cobert Report‘ which I find as funny as a poke in the eye but this book shows he does actually have some talent. Despite the delivery the type of humour is quite like David Sedaris’. Click the image for a torrent link.
An American Addiction: Drugs, Guerillas, and Counterinsurgency in US Intervention in Colombia
In one sentence: The government is running the drug trade.
Noam Chomsky, world renowned political thinker, philosopher, activist and author everyone ought to read OR anti-war, anti-US, pinko nut-job. Depends on which side you lean towards.
Click the image for a torrent link.
Happy reading/listening!