Quoth The Devourer: “Here’s something quick and easy for the middle of the week, just a short meme. Just copy and paste to your own post (and, you know, obviously change the answers so they’re yours and not mine).”

Here’s something quick and easy for the middle of the week, just a short meme. Just copy and paste to your own post (and, you know, obviously change the answers so they’re yours and not mine).

Current/most recent audiobook:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, narrated by David Colacci for Brilliance Audio. (Yeah, I haven’t updated the sidebar yet…)

Impressions:

It’s hard to believe that until very recently there was only the “abridged” version, which stood at about one-third (eight hours vs. 26 hours) of the full book. This is a Pulitzer-winning novel which is fun to read and let yourself be carried away by, and Colacci’s accents — both Brooklyn and Czech, and beyond — add a lovely layer of flavor to it all.

Current/most recent favorite audiobook:

Whew. That’s a hard one, but for most recent I will go with Last Dragon by J. M. McDermott, read by Cori Samuel for Iambik Audio, which I listened to in May, by just a hair over Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 which I finished in early June. Last Dragon gets pretty darned close to cracking my all-time favorite audiobooks list (The Magicians, Finch, The Road, …), but I’ll need a little more time in the rearview to decide on that.

Favorite narrator you’ve discovered recently:

Hard to believe, maybe, but I only recently listened to my first Simon Vance audiobooks. Needless to say, more will be listened to in the near future.

One title from your TBL (to be listened) stack, or your audio wishlist:

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon and Iron Council by China Mieville. If either were available at Audible (US), I’d have already listened to both. I will break down fairly soon and order the CD set of the Chabon.

Your audio dream team (what book or author would you LOVE to see paired with a certain narrator, can already exist or not):

It already exists: Stefan Rudnicki reading Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses.

The Devourer of Books is having an Audiobook Week this week, encouraging other audiobooks bloggers to join in. Bob Reiss at The Guilded Earlobe has already done so. So I’ll chip in with something short and take a stab at the topic.

It was actually about a year ago (June 20th to be precise) that I first started seriously blogging about audiobooks here — though I back-posted a few months of “best of the month” picks, a feature I only continued forward a few months. My biggest feature ended up being the 4-part 2011 in review series, followed by a ridiculously huge preview of 2012 which I’ve referenced myself in putting together upcoming release schedules for my release week posts.

I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do, other than have a place to keep my own notes about audiobooks coming out that I wanted to listen to, and bemoan the list of books which weren’t available in audio. I found that I could receive review copies (awesome), interview authors and narrators (even more awesome), and finally start publishing reviews and interviews by contributors (I don’t have to do anything? sweet!). This year, I thought I would publish a feature every Friday, and an interview every Monday. Yeah, that fell by the wayside fairly quickly, though a few more are in the works. I started putting together a monthly listening report instead, which, yeah, I didn’t post May’s in early June, so I’m working on either putting together a 2-month report, or just scrapping that and putting out reviews as I put them together instead of in a monthly group.

It was July 9th of last year that I started finding out about the wider audiobooks blogging community, falling instantly in followship to The Guilded Earlobe, leading eventually to The Devourer of Books herself, and a few others. It’s definitely led to my listening to a lot, lot, lot more audiobooks than in previous years. Instead of a trickle of one audiobook a month or so, it’s 5, 6, 7, sometimes even more per month, in addition to reading more as well. And, and this is the best part, listening more often to books I enjoy — I’ve come to trust Bob’s reviews. Even the audiobooks he doesn’t like, his reviews sometimes convince me to listen myself. I think that’s the sign of a good audiobooks reviewer, and that’s something I’d like to be able to do more.

On that note, if I’m going to spend more time on the blog today, it should be on getting more of those May and June reviews finished…