Everybody lies

posted on Friday, May, 9th, 2008 in reading matter

I am normally not a big fan of audiobooks. I often find that my mind tends to drift off and I lose the thread of the story, if I don’t concentrate very hard. The only audiobook I have enjoyed so far has been “Three Men in a Boat”, read by Hugh Laurie. And that was easy, because not only is it a hilariously funny story, but Hugh Laurie is the perfect narrator for it. How could I ever drift off while listening to Hugh? Exactly.

Now, my new found enthusiasm for audiobooks incidentally was sparked by Hugh Laurie as well, if only indirectly. You see, it was on his recommendation, so to speak, that I started to read my first P.G. Wodehouse novels recently. And, not surprisingly for anybody familiar with said novels, I enjoyed them just as much as Hugh’s foreword had led me to believe I would. (I will in time write a review about them, too.)

So, since I am a newly converted Wodehouse addict, obviously I started to look for more of his books. And that was how I happened to stumble upon LibriVox.

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain, read mostly by volunteers. They have oodles of books there, as far as I can tell.

For myself, of course, I was only interested in the Wodehouse stories, of which there are 19 finished ones recorded and a couple others in the works. As of today, I have downloaded most of them, but only listened to “Psmith in the city” (only partway through). And even though the fact that the single chapters are read by different people takes some getting used to, I quite enjoyed it so far. I might have enjoyed it still more if I had read it myself, but at least I got to hear the story at all, whereas I just don’t have the money to buy all the books right now. Plus, audiobooks do really have their merits on long distance drives – can’t read very well while driving the car, after all.

So if you’re a fan of audiobooks, it might be worth to check out LibriVox. Oh, did I mention that you can also volunteer to read for them? That sounds like fun. Of course, with my dreadful german accent I will abstain from doing so.