As I’ve mentioned before, I am a fan of audiobooks. I enjoy crafting to them, and hubby and I like listening to them in the car (mostly because our tastes in music is quite different). Unfortunately, the iPhone (well, glorified iPod, since it couldn’t make calls anymore) no longer works, so we can’t listen in the car anymore (it doesn’t recognize anything not Apple *pout*).
Well, I miss listening to them, so I figured I’d try something new. The Audible app has a sleeper function, so for the last couple of nights I’ve been listening to The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. It’s one of my favorite series and I’ve indulged in it several times over the years. It seemed like a good one to try this whole bedtime reading thing. Come to find out that either I fall asleep a lot faster than I think I do, or listening to the book is the perfect night time routine for me because I barely last a couple of minutes before I’m out. I haven’t decided yet whether this is a good or a bad thing when it comes to the reading aspect of things, but I sure am glad for it from a sleep perspective ;-).
By the way, one of the reasons why the Thursday Next series is a favorite, and Jasper Fforde is at the top of my Must Read Author list is because of how he writes. The very first time I read The Eyre Affair it admittedly took me a good third of the book for me to get into it. However, that is solely on me as the reader. Why? Because I had a hard time grasping/accepting that the book had so many, many familiar things in it and have it not be set in the England I knew and in a time I was familiar with. Once that got through my thick head (and yes, that was all on me, trust me on that), I couldn’t get enough of it. Jasper’s writing is engaging and like nothing I’ve ever come across before.
Jasper Fforde will set your entire understanding of reading and writing on its head. At least, that’s what it did for me. Before reading The Eyre Affair, I saw books as a certain thing. The words were the words and the story was as it was meant to be for better or worse. After reading it, it was like waking up to a wholly new world, one within which the characters on a page (be it ones I read or wrote) had a life of their own, and the author is merely a medium. To be quite honest, I really like the idea of that and it gives a whoooooole new meaning to getting Lost in a Good Book (see what I did there?).
Give it a chance. You might just discover something new about yourself. Oh, and do give the audio version a try. Susan Duerden (who reads The Eyre Affair) and Emily Gray (who reads Lost in a Good Book and Well of Lost Plots) both bring Thursday Next and her world to life (and the soothing accents help, too).
Another Piece of Me 