I had a long drive without the family this weekend, so in what I took for a spark of brilliance, I decided to find an audiobook online to bring with me in the car. I Googled away for a free book, and ended up at Project Gutenberg, which has a small selection of Audio Book, human-read to accompany their textual efforts.
My choice was A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is the first Sherlock Holmes book written, and I’ve read it (on paper) at least once, maybe twice. It’s a full-length novel, though many of the Holmes tales are short stories. Listening changes the reading, and I found the story still engrossing but the writing itself little more than serviceable at times… which I’ve never noticed while physically reading these tales.
It was mildly frustrating to download each of the 14 sections one by one, but a fast connection and the context-sensitive menu in Safari (“Download linked file”) made the process pretty slick. Even more impressive was the way iTunes broke up the playlist into four CDs seamlessly, and made something I’ve never done before as easy as a process repeated for years. Given all the crazy things that could happen, that’s actually quite impressive. The CDs played beautifully in the car, but I didn’t finish the novel on the drive, so brought them into the house. The CD/DVD player in the living room choked on the disc (the format?), so we listened to the last 40 minutes on the computer. Much harder to focus sitting in a room than in the driver’s seat, but happy to top it off.
I’m happy to give away the four-CD set to the next interested listener.