Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I know the entries haven’t exactly been spilling out lately. Chock that up to parenthood I guess, which tends to take up most of the free time at home I used to devote to blogging, and the time that is left over is just an opportunity to catch up on sleep!

However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio. First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I’ve listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening. Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it’s hard to start reading history books when there’s lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn’t listening to books at that point, and didn’t want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer. There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible. I thought I’d spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books. It’s odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven’t read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn’t feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible. But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be “out of touch.” Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May. I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships. I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I’d ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book “credit” cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible’s Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay. Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There’s some fine print at the bottom which says “Offer valid for new Audible customers only.” Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account. Yes you can do this. Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want. I don’t think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts. The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can’t. Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts. You can’t activate more than two accounts on a given player. I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose. In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn’t read and really wanted to. So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn’t enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits. What do I do with those credits? So far, the only ones I’ve used were for a podcast! Well, that’s what Audible calls them anyway. They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address. Unfortunately, as I’ve found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod. Yes, I still speed things up! Although I do this via the iPod’s built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier. I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine. Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible. Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books. Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times! So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account! I can’t escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn’t done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn’t going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that’s fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn’t have the confidence that these were books worth listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I’ve also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me. But I’ve also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?
The point of this is that I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I’d start posting them here as well, since I’m not posting much else these days! So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

As a slow reader, I took to Audio Books when I first heard of Audible.com five or six years ago. Audible.com provides audio books over the internet as digital files that you can play on your computer, iPod, or many other audio devices. The pricing was so much less than it was at the book store. The ability to download and play something from a very large selection of audio books on demand was irresistible. A huge chunk of Audible.com’s selection was and is unabridged, whereas up until fairly recently it was difficult to find any unabridged audio books at a book store, and when you could find them, they were outrageously priced – probably several times the price of the equivalent hardcover.

Just the other day, the New York Times published an article by Amy Harmon about audio books and I was actually quoted in it! The article asks the question whether listening to audio books is the same thing as reading, or whether it’s inferior. My big reason, as stated in the article, for listening to audio books is that I’m a slow reader. Basically I read stuff aloud in my head at about the same pace as someone would read in an audio book. I’ve tried speed reading courses but they never seemed to work. Aside from this, of course, you can listen to a book without needing total concentration as with a written book. So I can listen at the gym, in the car, etc. Some people consider this inferior because you aren’t using your mind as much to invent voices in your head. You can linger on sentences or words without having to keep going if you want. But in general, I think it’s all very individual. Some people get a lot more out of reading a book than listening to an audio book, whereas for others they are similar, and still others audio seems to have an added value. What do you think?

The New York Times requires a subscription to read the article, but Luke Sonnier has reprinted it on his blog along with some commentary about why he thinks reading is superior. There’s also some discussion going on in his comments that indicates some of the contentiousness of this issue. Neil Gaiman, a professional writer no less, makes some good points in favor of audio books and why those who assert the superiority of the written word are snobs.

Back to Audible.com. This week the IT Conversations Podcast’s show Web Talk interviewed Audible.com’s Founder and CEO, Don Katz. While not the most scintillating orator, Don Katz does let us in on a lot of interesting info, particularly on where Audible may be going in the near future. In particular he talks specifically about how they are planning on offering over-the-air downloadable content. So, for compatible devices, specifically smartphones like the Treo 650 which can both download data from the internet and play Audible files, soon you will be able to download this content directly from anywhere. Up until now, one has had to be chained to a computer that syncs such data onto your device, but with the increasing speeds of cellular data networks, smartphones rely less and less synching to an individual’s computer for transferring information.

The other subject that Katz talks about is podcasting. Actually a good part of the interview centers on it. Katz is asked whether it threatens their business and predictably says it doesn’t, but it seems like even more traditional forms of media he has been smart to take it seriously enough to get Audible somehow involved in the whole podcasting phenomenon. There hasn’t been anything announced, but it sounds like there may be plans to court some podcasters for inclusion as programming that Audible sells. This will, of course, be very different from the current, completely free (or voluntary contribution) model. Will podcasters take advantage of such a system and make only part of the podcasts freely downloadable? Or none? Will they only provide their last podcast for download and let Audible sell their archives? Some of course will. But many will, I think, be resistant to forcing people to sell something that they have labeled with the Creative Commons license. Who knows, Audible could even offer podcasters a salary and let them, as Katz said “quit their day job,” as long as they could sell their content (and likely have it not freely available otherwise). I will admit that since I got into podcasting, I’ve had so much to listen to that I haven’t listened to many books over the last 6 months! I’m not about to unsubscribe to Audible, but I do think that there’s so much great content available freely via podcasts that for many, it will be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee for more, even if it is stuff that is not available via free podcast.

While I love Audible in many ways, I thought I would get off my chest a couple of things that have nagged me about them for a while, and I know I’m not alone. The first is related to Audible’s web interface. There are often problems where if you search for an author or title, it doesn’t come up with the books you know they have. But this is an occasional annoyance. My major issue is with their wish list and search functionality which I think are extremely clunky! Audible has tons of books in their library and so it’s very easy to build up a wish list that is hundreds of books. In order to keep this up to date and prune it so that it doesn’t get completely out of control, Audible should make it easy to remove, and sort the list in different ways. Instead, you have to look at your list in 20-book increments for one, and secondly, while you can sort on various fields, you cannot sort in revers order. In order to see the books I’ve added to my wish list most recently, I have to click on sort by date added and then page forward a dozen or more times. Audible’s site is often sluggish making this a time consuming process. I’m a web developer by profession and so I know these changes to the interface are not huge ones. I realize that Audible has many other places to put its resources, such as in actually recording the books and customer support, but it seems like the way most people browse and buy books could be improved quite a bit. Katz did say there were improvements coming in these areas, so I await them with great hope, but really it’s been a long time coming!

While Audible has tons of material, my one wish would be that they would carry more “special interest” material, such as computer books, reference books, instructional manuals, etc. Audible occasionally has something close to this in the way of kinds of “self-help” material, but it is almost always in abridged formats. I think this is the last big market for Audible. If they could somehow convince publishers to produce unabridged audio versions of books that aren’t just categorized as fiction or non-fiction (historical, political, etc), then I think they could attract even more readership.

Finally, I wish that Audible would give more choices in the formats they offer for various devices. Audible has four formats they offer their programs in; level 1 being the poorest quality and level 4 being the best. Of course level 4 takes up much more spaces than level 1. Audible offers level 4 for iPods, but not for my Treo 650. Perhaps this is some technical issue with the Treo not having enough processing power or battery power to play the file, but my guess is that it is more likely a decision Audible made based on the file size. Since the Treo has only a very small amount of internal memory, it would be infeasible to expect people to store their books anywhere but on an external memory card. While a couple of years ago probably 128MB or 256MB would be the largest most people would invest in, one can now get a 1GB card for $70 give or take and if price is now object than you can even get a 2GB card. Even 1GB still will store just about any unabridged book in its entirety, and up to several depending on length, all at level 4. While I like the thought of having all my books on my iPod, it sure would be nice to listen to everything on one device. But not having that extra fidelity does make the decision to ditch my iPod for most occasions not a very likely one.

Aside from these relatively minor annoyances, Audible and Audio books have changed my life in the last five years. I’ve read upwards of 60 or 70 books, whereas the previous 5 years I probably read 6 or 7! In my mind, the fact that I didn’t read these on paper makes no difference. I can still recall the good ones in detail and many greatly influenced my thinking.

Those who’ve read my blog for a while will know of my long-time membership with Audible.com, which provides audio books in the form of digital files you download from their site, kind of like MP3 files, but with copy-protection. Initially, one could sign up for a subscription that would give you five audio books per month for $30 or so, only $6 for each book! Nice deal except that unless you spend most of your waking time listening to the stuff – maybe if you’re a truck driver or something similar where you always can listen while doing other things – eventually you’ll probably get behind on your pile of books!

Eventually, as Audible grew, they dropped the book total down to where it is now – two (alternately you can get one book and one “subscription” to a radio show, magazine or newspaper transcript), for $20 per month, or $10 per book. Still not bad compared to the exorbitant rates you see for books at a Borders or Barnes and Noble – anywhere from $15 to $100 depending on how long the book is and whether it’s abridged or not. Books you buy via your subscription at Audible are based off of your monthly “credit” meaning the equivalent of $10, no matter the length. However, the problem is that you are limited to those two books. If you want to purchase more in a given month, you can, but you have to pay the higher Audible price, which is just a more discounted version than what you would pay in a bookstore, or what the book is listed for. So it’s still a savings, but you can also end up paying $50 for one book, if not more.

Once in a while, Audible has sales, and today Audible happens to be having a type of sale that I’ve only seen once before, maybe twice, in the last year or two. This sale entitles any Audible.com member to buy as many books as they want at a flat rate of $10 per book. There are so many great books on Audible’s site, that I have a hard time keeping my wish list under 400 titles, so this will help me out. Later today I’ll probably by a bunch of titles I’ve been eyeing for a few months now. Trust, me, though, it will still be a tiny fraction of my wish list!

Apparently, you can sign up for Audible.com count today and take advantage of the same sale for customers – this according to Audible.com customer support. One can sign up without a yearly contract, but what I have done in the past is take advantage of a deal that Audible has that gives you $100 off of a whole series of devices that can play audible files, including iPods, Treo 600’s, and many others. A third option is to sign up for a year and get a free Muvo MP3 player to play your music on.

In any case, if this entry does end up motivating you to start an account with Audible (“leviwallach”), all I ask is that you enter my audible ID as the referrer, as this will give me an extra book credit or two. Again, this sale is only for today – September 15, 2004, so if you are reading this even a day after, you’re already too late, sorry, but Audible is still worth a look if you like Audio Books and don’t want to deal with the hassle of tapes, the expense of retail price, or the inconvenience of library borrowing.

Update: Oops! This sale is not one day as I mention above! Maybe the last one was just a day and that’s what confused me. This one turns out to be 10 days! It lasts throug September 24. Sorry about that!

I recently traded in my older 30GB third generation iPod for one of the newer 40GB 4th generation ones. Other than the added capacity and storage space, the main reason, I told myself, I needed one, was the new iPods’ ability to speed up or slow down audiobook playback without actually increasing the PITCH of the speaker’s voice and making it sound like you were listening to Alvin recite Master and Commander – or alternately Fat Albert.

As some who’ve been following my blog for a while know, I like listening to audiobooks. I have a subscription with Audible.com, which is a great service if you like Audiobooks, have a high-speed internet connection, and want to pay less than what you would if you bought the same thing at a store. Of course going to the library would be much cheaper, but then you have to return it within a given period of time, among other issues. Once you buy a book on Audible, you can download it as many times as you want from your central “Library.” You can buy books ala carte, or you can subscribe to a “Listener” program where you get a couple books a month at $10 each. Audible has radio programs and newspaper and magazine transcripts read that you can subscribe to as well.the iPod is one of the devices that can play Audible content, which isn’t in an open format like MP3. In any case, I have subscribed for about five years now, although after starting to date my now wife I put the subscription on hold as I simply didn’t have the time to listen. After we got engaged I got her a subscription and renewed my own. Now we both listen so that we don’t have to talk to each other! Just kidding!

While two books a month may not seem like a huge amount, that might average out to 20 hours, or about 45 minutes a day just to keep up. Of course along the way Audible has thrown a free book at me here and there either because I referred someone or because I made a complaint about a problem or for completely unknown reasons. This and the propensity for me to be addicted to NPR radio, thus usurping prime downtime away from audio books, has left me with a large backlog of books I haven’t read. Something on the order of 35 books. Just stop listening for a couple of months and you’re yet another 4 books in the hole!

When we stopped by the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner in order to get an iTrip for my wife’s new iPod Mini, I had no clue that we would be confronted by the new “4G” iPod models as they are called. I convinced myself that I should buy the new one and sell my old one, thus getting away with simply paying a small “upgrade fee” and potentially benefiting by getting through audio books faster, and thus having a real hope of reading all my Audible content within my lifetime! Of course, this was back in July when I had started listening to NPR again and hadn’t listened to an audiobook in several weeks. Getting the new iPod somehow didn’t remotivate me to get back into audio books until now. After all, there was the Democratic National Convention, the Olympics, and now the Republican National Convention, and we also had a vacation.

Now that I’m finally back to the books, I decided to try out the speeding up feature of the new iPods. It does what it’s supposed to, but with some caveats. You can definitely hear some “clipping” of some of the voice here and there. It hasn’t been so bad that it’s distracting or makes it harder to understand, although once in a while it does seem to cut something out that makes a difference and I have to just accept that I’m not going to get that particular sentence. Because things go faster, it does actually encourage you to pay more attention. Depending on the audio book, I can sometimes lose focus, just as with a book, then I find myself realizing that I’ve been thinking about something else while I’ve lost seconds or minutes worth of the book! But I found myself paying more attention because without that, you can easily miss things, or more things than you would at a slower playback. I don’t know if it is the clipping or something else, but the other issue I’ve had is that the playback seems like it is of a lower quality. It almost sounds like the audio artifacts you might get from a satellite phone, but not nearly as extreme and only for split seconds here and there.

Finally, I just decided that I needed to quantify the benefit I was supposedly getting from this speeding up of the book. I expected it to be dramatic, but I also wasn’t sure how it worked. In principle it’s very easy to imagine how programmers might simply scan ahead through a file and look for spaces where there is very little in the way of sound, and then tell the iPod to skip over most of this blank space. Thus, I figured, the amount you save it time must vary a lot based on the book. If a narrator has lots of dramatic pauses, and generally speaks more slowly and methodically, the time savings could be much more dramatic than a narrator who speaks quickly and with few pauses. So, I played a couple of audio books with the speed set to high and looked at where they were at 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, and 60 minutes. At first it seemed like as I was taking the numbers down, the “time compression” rate was changing, but I soon found a pattern, and that pattern was repeated in two different audio books I tried this with, ‘Tis Unabridged by Frank McCourt, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Perhaps others could confirm this with other test, but the testing was too similar to deny this pattern. What I found was that for every X amount of regular time that went by 1.25 times that amount would go by within the audio book. In other words, to read a 10 hour book, it would only take 1/1.25 x 10 hours or 80% of the normal 10 hours being 8 hours. This is a decent amount of time saved, although it does take a lot of books before it really gets noticeable. If my 35 or so books average out to 10 hours (it’s probably a bit higher), than that’s 350 hours, and so if I play them at the higher speed, I end up saving 70 hours of time! That’s almost 3 days! Or more applicably, it’s probably a good 2+ months worth of listening to small amounts on a daily basis.

The real question, though, is all this added time I will have worth the lesser audio quality of the books. I also assume that some books just will not take very well to the faster pace. You lose something tangible but also something intangible in a beautiful narration of some books. A dry non-fiction piece would probably be fine, but a novel with a skilled narrator that inserts dramatic pauses, and has a very specific and effective timing, which is dashed by the speeding up, would not work very well, I’m afraid. I guess the conclusion, then, is just to take it book by book. One strategy might be listening to the first 10 minutes in normal speed to get a feel for the narration, and then switching it and seeing how they compare – whether too much is lost or whether it gives about the same feel, just faster.

First let me say that this 21 Dog Years made me laugh harder than any other book I’ve read since Me Talk Pretty One Day. It’s kind of Office Space meets Tetherballs of Bogainville meets Andy Richter and probably was especially funny to me because I lived through the exact same time and had experiences that while not as outlandish as the author’s, still felt very familiar.

Mike Daisy, who wrote this book which describes his experiences after college first in the temping world and then in the world of a .com company (actually the .com company, Amazon.com) describes himself as a slacker, a dilettante, and a geek, but not a particularly “high-level” geek. I could describe myself in the same terms, but not quite as flamboyantly. In high school I was an introverted science-oriented student, but lacked the savant capabilities one often sees portrayed in the movies where the resident geed can get in front of his computer, start typing really fast, squint, strains as if a bit constipated, and then shout “I’m in!” as he’s just hacked into a national defense supercomputer. I did, however, participate in things that either amazed or confused my family since at that time the Internet was something only a small group of academicians knew much of anything about. This was, after all, back in the early 1980’s.

Daisy is a few years younger than me, and while I somehow lucked into my first job as a programming assistant in a student travel/exchange company, it appears he roamed his way around Europe in true bohemian style, at least for a bit before coming back and continuing a pseudo-bohemian existence in Seattle, where it seems it is very easy to be bohemian, or at least it was in the 1990’s. Instead of going on to grad school as I did, Daisy just temped for a while and eventually lucked into a job with Amazon.com in 1998 when they were just starting to fly.

What ensues is a tale of an Amazon.com insider, or at least an Amazon.com Customer Support insider. Being a telemarketer in high school for a summer and after college being a technical support drone for a software company, I know first hand that one can become cynical very quickly. Daisy describes how this became, at least for him, an opportunity to ship scandalous books to clergy or others who were nasty to him, or to alternately refund or send free stuff to people who were nice. In order to decrease his long call resolution average, he would simply hang up on customers within a few seconds of picking up their call.

As with other blindingly successful .coms of this era, Amazon.com was (and still is) headed by a charismatic leader, Jeff Bezos, whom all the Amazon.com employees seemingly looked up to as a “geek Mesiah.” Daisy intersperses his prose with emails that he wrote (but never sent) to Bezos. These emails are so intimate because they were never meant to be sent, more of an exercise in soul searching and Daisy trying to understand his very conflicting feelings toward Bezos and Amazon.com. On the one hand, Daisy was overtaken with the “coolness” of the ideas that Amazon.com pitched and it’s divine Jeff. On the other hand, Daisy is slowly having his soul sucked out of his body by answering the same questions, request, or complaints every day all day long. He finally is able to maneuver out of phone support to a more coveted “Business Development” department by making up a study he has concocted, but this just serves to show him how random and meaningless things are.

In fact, the whole book is really Daisy’s search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. From his college days where he attained the superfluous degree in Aesthetics, to his wanderings in Europe and Seattle, he, along with many of us from his generation, were convinced that some monumental event in the future (something similar to the incredible events we watched happening in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) would somehow wipe the playing board in some way that would make whatever we were doing at the moment irrelevant. So what was the point in working hard, saving money, and generally being miserable?

Amazon.com, as Daisy portrays it, and really the whole internet, became something to “believe in” for all those non-believers. It was the revolution and the revelation rolled into one. But when it became obvious that while the rules were turned on their heads, this was not necessarily better than the old rules. They were just less comprehensible and more based on random fate. This, the final reckoning that all .com’s went through when the investors all of sudden realized that they had actually needed to turn profits, and his own conscience, finally broke Daisy down to a point where something had to give.

Daisy actually performs pieces of this book (I can’t imagine him performing the whole things as it would be over 7 hours), as well as other monologues at various venues. He currently seems to be in NYC. He also maintains his own blog. Daisy did amateur theater before Amazon.com and so the monologues are I suppose an extension of that. If you can, I would highly recommend getting this book in Audio format. I listened to it via Audible.com where it is narrated by Daisy. Daisy has an incredibly expressive voice that can have you laughing your head off at one moment and then make you depressed the next. His writing is, for someone of his own generation, anyway, brilliant. He goes off on pop-culture-induced rants, parodies coworkers, customers, and supervisors, and generally makes the book enormously enjoyable to listen to. Daisy looks a bit like Andy Richter, and his humor is not too far from Richter’s, perhaps just infused with a bit more literary and historical references that he feels obligated to throw in as compensation for his otherwise seemingly impractical college degree.

Even if you missed out on the whole “internet revolution” and find much of the book to be unfamiliar ground, I would still recommend it on the basis of it being a fascinating look at an interesting subculture or subcultures during the heady days when people were deluding themselves completely about how all the rules had changed and they no longer really had to pay any heed to common sense anymore. Plus it is a somewhat moving story about a guy who is struggling with the nihilism of today’s culture and somehow trying to stay sane, even if he seems completely insane half of the time.

National Public Radio has been derided by conservatives as being an example of a liberal slant in the media. Maybe this is true, maybe not. But to me more than being slanted towards one side or another, NPR distinguishes itself as being thoughtful and in-depth rather than based on fluff and stereotypes. They don’t base what stories they do on the old adage “if it bleed it leads” because they are not out to gain the highest ratings in order to maintain funding via advertising. They have been ridiculed as being elitist, snooty, pretentious, etc. There are definitely times where I get this feeling too, and I’m probably less likely to get it because I’ve been listening to them for so long. Despite its flaws, NPR is an incredible resource of information. You may not trust everything that you hear, but neither should you from any one source of media, be it NPR, Howard Stern, or CNN. There are inherent biases no matter how much someone puts on a show of being “objective.” Fox’s whole “fair and balanced” mantra is nonsense. What they are is a network that has a very definite slant towards the right. I know some may say it just seems that way because most of the media is so far to the left that Fox seems like it’s to the right even though it’s really in the middle, but that doesn’t ring true to me. It has many obviously conservative commentators and only one admittedly liberal one. I admit I haven’t watched it since we got rid of cable a year or so ago, so I can’t speak to it’s current state, but somehow I don’t think it’s changed much.

I first stumbled onto NPR in college. When I was growing up, I simply never heard it in our house. It would have fit in, since my mom is a news junky, but we were too fixated on TV and I don’t think there was a 24-hour NPR station in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s, although I could be wrong. In high school I was listening to K-Rock in NYC, which played classic rock. Then towards the end of high school, or perhaps the beginning of college, I started listening to a shortwave radio I had bought. It was a whole new world. Shortwave broadcasts are generally government run stations from around the world without commercials and with very in-depth coverage in addition to a wide array of different programming. I was particularly interested in listening to Radio Moscow at the time as I had started to study Russian and was very interested in the country and it’s struggles in trying to open itself after 70 years of tyranny. As it turned out, I actually transferred into the school of communications at Boston University in my Sophomore year, this after realizing that Astronomy was 90% math and 10% physics or thereabouts, and that I had a foundation in neither. My thought was that I would study journalism and potentially become a foreign correspondent, hopefully in Russia. I eventually learned that one normally didn’t have one’s choice in where one went on assignment, and moreover the journalism classes I took did not leave me particularly enthralled. However, the school of communications at BU also housed an NPR studio, WBUR, and at the time I recall the Car Talk guys broadcasted from this building, although I never actually saw them. Being such a fan of NPR now, I wish I had taken more advantage of being at this school and gotten more involved in radio.

Naked in Baghdad is a book written by a veteran foreign correspondent from NPR, Anne Garrels. In it she recounts her time in Baghdad both leading up to, during, and after the U.S.-led invasion of last year. If you listen to NPR, Garrels’ voice is immediately recognizable. She rattles off insightful details in a way that rivets you, and you can tell she is intimately in tune with her surroundings. She tells her story matter-of-factly, and although she laces it with personal experiences that exposes her vulnerabilities and not-so-pretty side, she keeps her reporter’s steady tone, as if she is reporting on someone else’s story and not necessarily her own.

The story Garrels tells is a fascinating one. She first came to Baghdad months before the invasion and witnessed a regime trying to hold onto it’s grip while also trying to avoid war with the least amount of concessions. What I found most insightful was her reports on Iraqis and their opinions about America and the Iraqi regime. Much of this, especially before the war really got under way, was something Garrels has to interpret from indirect statements. Once the war has started and especially after the U.S. has successfully taken Baghdad, she gets to voice much more open opinion from the Iraqi people and it is a contradictory and diverse opinion. Iraqis, she reports, are grateful that Americans have ended Sadam’s hated regime, but also feel humiliated that a foreign power had to do this for them. They are a proud people in other words. They were also fearful not so much about the war itself as they had faith in the accuracy of the U.S.’s bombs, but about what might ensue after the actual invasion had concluded, and here it seems they have not been proven totally incorrect. There is still, one year later, a great deal of uncertainty about what will happen in Iraq. Will the disparate groups, many of which carry great animosity for one another based on sides taken during all the power plays over the last 30 years, ever be able to live together peacefully? No one knows.
I listened to an unabridged version of this book via Audible.com, and recommend this as the most natural way to ingest the book, since it is written by a radio correspondent. Interspersed between different sections of the book are “Brenda Bulletins” which are letters that Garrels’ husband Vint Lawrence wrote to an email list of Garrels’ friends to update them on her travails. So we hear Garrels’ own reporting, then we here Vint’s, which reworks it, by both putting it in the third person, but ironically making it more personal in some ways. I had mixed feelings about this device. In some ways, it might actually help in that it gives two different voices to the story, making it more heterogeneous and thus more interesting. On the other hand, there’s a lot of information that is simply repeated, and some of Vint’s letters are so stylized, especially after Garrels’ directness, it sometimes seems a bit flakey or pretentious. This may also have to do with Vint’s voice, which sometimes seems a bit affected compared to Garrels. Vint’s letters do seem to get more poignant and less playful and punny towards the end, thankfully, but then again perhaps I was just getting more used to them by that point. Of course this is only my opinion and I’m sure that others might actually have the view that these letters add to the overall experience. In any case, the book, especially the audio version of it is an extremely interesting, exciting, and poignant portrayal of what it was like for one reporter who actually stayed in Baghdad from before the war started to after the U.S. had secured the city, one of only a handful of journalists who did so.

Not having studies early American history since briefly in high school, my familiarity with Benjamin Franklin consisted mainly of a couple of facts. One is that Franklin is on the $100 bill, and the second was his “discovery” of electricity via the famous experiment with a kite and a key. I wonder how many other Americans have a similarly superficial knowledge. I would contend all of us would benefit from getting a clear picture of this very influential founding father.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson has generally had very favorable reviews from readers and critics alike and I would not disagree with them, although I don’t presume to be expert enough in historical matters of early America to comment on its accuracy. But it does seem like a fairly detailed account of Franklin’s life from the time he was 16 till his death at the age of 84.

Isaacson describes a man whose characteristics are not only likeable by most of us, but so familiar that one could easily imagine this man in today’s world. That’s not to say that Franklin would not be considered extraordinary even by today’s standards. His skill in diplomacy, rational thought, science, statesmanship, management, and many other areas would characterize him as a dynamic and multifaceted person by most. Among the items that impressed me greatly were the following:

Although Franklin initially looked down on blacks or rather black slaves as thieves, he very quickly changed his opinion upon seeing a classroom where black children were learning and started aided these schools monetarily. His opinion became that slavery itself made the individual (whoever they were) into less of a person, and became one of the most strident early abolitionists. Unlike those who wrote theoretically about slavery being an evil but who still maintained their own (Jefferson is one quick example), Franklin put his money where his mouth was.

Franklin never belonged to a specific faith, but especially late in life would sometimes evoke god as the creator of things in trying to promote humility. His view of the divine however, was pragmatic and rational, and he took the opinion that it was useless to bother his mind with questions about the details of scripture – even such a major one as to whether Jesus was divine – when there was no way to prove this. Instead he boiled all religions into the common denominator of “do good to others.”

His scientific thoughts and experiments were of course very impressive, and all of this was amazing for a man who was self-taught, of humble beginnings. He was indeed, the first Heratio Alger story, and assuredly Alger used the example of Franklin to model his stories.

Since Franklin’s death, his image has increased and decreased in status as those who were his antithesis gained stature and influence. David Brook’s Bobos in Paradise explains this long struggle between Franklin’s rational, practical Bourgeois, and the romantic Bohemian characterized by Keats and so many others. Admittedly Franklin does seem to embody the bourgeois stereotypes almost to an extreme, and yet I come away from this book with nothing but admiration. Perhaps because I’m not overtly passionate about most issues myself. Some people prefer a polite and rational argument to passionate entreaties, screaming, or other dramatics. Not everyone has to embody both rationalism and passion, and few can pull that off, so why not have prime examples of the most effective in both of these?

I actually listened to this as an audio book download from Audible.com. It was an abridged version, but even so was over 7 hours. I’m sure the book or unabridged version would go into a great deal more detail but it’s hard to know how helpful that added detail is, especially as an introduction to a topic that one has little knowledge of to begin with..

Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, is a fascinating book about the history of, you guessed it, Salt. It’s amazing how something we take for granted because it is so cheap and on every table, whether at someone’s home or at a restaurant. It is given away for free at fast food restaurants, and is in copious supply in our vast oceans that take up most of the surface area of the planet. Yet Salt was not always taken for granted. Kurlansky talks about how for thousands of years it was a vital resource that played into economics, politics, wars, technological progress, and culture in general.

Kurlansky is incredibly thorough in his accounting of the story of Salt. However, at points the level of detail gets a bit too deep for me. Like other nonfiction books that treat a subject with lots of history, sometimes the relentless listing of people and places, and events get overwhelming. Salt also seems to jump around relentlessly both geographically and chronologically. I still found it very
interesting, just a bit bewildering at points! One thing that Kurlansky recounts which I think could have been left out is his recounting of recipes that somehow involve salt as an ingredient. These recipes go back thousands of years and they are sometimes fascinating, but they are all quoted from their original sources and thus use somewhat archaic language and ingredients that most would be unfamiliar with today. A few of these might have been good to spice things up, but Kurlansky probably includes a couple dozen or so of these!

All in all, it was a decent read, but one that I fear many may put down after a while or at least have to skim through. I actually listened to this book on Audible.com. The narration, by Scott Brick, was affective and kept my attention throughout most of the reading despite some of the problems with the subject matter as expressed above.

The first I actually heard the name Philip K. Dick, it was from a radio host on WBAI, Jim Freund, a true Dick fanatic. He was a member of a local bulletin board system in New York City called Magpie, created by Steve Manes. A bunch of us were invited over to WBAI to watch him do his show, The Hour of the Wolf, which was unfortunately 5am to 7am. But this was back in the 80’s and I was still young and all-nighters were not a rare occurance for me back then. A few years later Jim Freund actually got us tickets for a theatrical performance of Dick’s Close My Eyes The Policeman Said put on by a theater group from NYU.

I call myself a PKD (Philip K. Dick) fan, but I’m ashamed to say that I really have not read considerable amounts of his prose. The novels I’ve read are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, and Radio Free Albemuth. Up until reading this collection of short stories, I’d never read any of his short fiction.

For those unfamiliar with Dick, his stories are generally dark and paranoid, and reality is shaky. Dick deals with issues of sanity, alternate realities, drug-distorted realities, religious-distorted realities, and the different perspectives of reality between artificial life (or artificial intelligence as it’s known to us today) and natural life. Dick himself had a somewhat tenuous grasp on reality during some of his life and eventually drank himself to death. Nonetheless, his copious works carry his name forward and this book is an example of how it has influenced film makers.

As a science fiction author I find he was often off the mark when it comes to some of the finer details in his portrayal of future worlds. It’s a common complaint that when imagining the future, authors often underestimate the changes in the farther future (say of 50 or more years), but overestimate the changes in the nearer future (say under 25 years). In addition, the vast majority of what Dick wrote was before the age of the personal computer, and since few authors envisioned such an enormously influential device on society, a great deal of what came before the mid 1970’s seems very dated. Nonetheless, Dick does get a few ideas eerily right. Reality may not be as dark and devastated as the ones he painted, but some of the fears he had play themselves out in the more questionable actions that government has taken since his death. Whether or not his books accurately predict our future is not of the utmost relevence, however. Appropriately enough, his work, to me anyway, is more about alternate futures; futures that could have been possible but have turned out not to be - at least mostly - or at least not yet.

As mentioned, many of Dick’s works have been cinematized. The first of these was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (although his story Imposter was apparently dramatized for TV in the 60’s), which was made into the Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and even watching it today, over twenty years after it came out, it still does not seem “dated” to me the way so many older (and even some more recent)Sci-Fi movies do. The book, although containing the same characters and also being about replicants, was turned on it’s head. In the movie, the whole point of it is that the replicants are given expiration dates because it’s found that after a certain point they develop real emotions. Whereas in the book, the reason they are being hunted is because they cannot have real emotions, like compassion, and so have no qualms about killing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is one of the few of Dick’s full-length novels that’s been made into a movie. Most of the other movies based on his work have adapted short stories, and the collection reviewed here contains most of these screen-adapted stories. Unfortunately the cinematic versions of these stories pale in comparison to Blade Runner. Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, most of these stories have to some degree been turned on their heads.

In Paycheck, the alternate future is more fleshed out in the book and it is one where the government is more oppressive and companies are the only entities that hold significant power outside the government. The individual has few rights. This is a common theme in Dick’s works. The political/military/economic dynamics play into the story in a central way, very different from the somewhat personal story of a lone freelancer pitted against a shady company in the movie.

In Minority Report, Dick’s view of a post WWIII future where world governments battle with military forces and industry for power changes a great deal of how the story works out. Again, much of the plot remains the same. John Anderton is a police commissioner in charge of “Pre-Crime,” a division that predicts murders before they happen, by way of idiots who babble incoherently and then their words are processed by a computer into coherent thoughts. Murder has basically been eliminated until he finds his own name being predicted by the idiots. The movie is more about Anderton clearing his name and finding the true murderer, but the book diverts from this in a very “P.K. Dickian” way, which although certainly interesting is not exactly standard movie fare!

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was made into the 1990 film Total Recall, with Arnold Schwartzenigger. This might have been the most alterned in some ways as any of his stories. This was a fairly short story about uncovering memories that had supposedly been deleted. It ends in a fairly bizarre and abrupt way that you will never expect. Never do we see the main character, Quail, go to Mars. He simply retells a few scant details about being on the planet as an undercover agent. Whereas the movie only hints at this, in the orginal story you get hit much more up front by the question of how real memory is and what memory is real and what is fantasy.

The final story in the collection that was converted to the screen was Second Variety, which was made into the movie Screamers. This is the one film that I did not see, so I can’t really speak to the difference between it and the original story. I will say that the story is very typical of Dick, about a soldier on an Earth that has been ravaged by nuclear war. Intelligent machines have become a major element of the battle. As with other works by Dick, what we initially assume about the identity of a person starts to come into doubt. I thought this was a good, albeit pretty dark tale.

The one movie that I’ve seen based on a story by Dick which was not included in this collection was Imposter. The movie was quite terrible, so I can’t imagine the story being worse, and assume it must have been a whole lot better, but then I’m sure Dick has some duds in his collection as many prolific writers do.

The last piece in this collection, The Eyes Have It, is a spoof, very short and undoubtedly something that will make you laugh

This particular collection of stories is actually not found in a book, but rather an audio presentation by Harper Colins Audio, available on Audible.com. The stories are narrated by Keir Dullea, who does an decent job at reproducing the somewhat noirish, paranoid tone of these stories.

We were given Time and Again, by Jack Finnie, as our first summer reading assignment in the summer between 9^th and 10^th grade, I believe. As was typical, I got about ¼ through the book before putting it down. At the time, my attention span was much more suited to comic books or stuff of similar length. I held onto the book, though, and it is still on my bookshelf over 20 years later. Of course it remained one of those books that simply sat there waiting to be read all this time, along with the hundreds of others! I am not only easily distracted, but a slow reader. I like to buy books that sound fascinating, but often don’t read them or if I do, I will start them but never finish.

This is why Audible.com has saved me in many ways. The company manages downloadable audio books via a subscription setup that is very reasonable compared to how much it costs to actually buy tapes or CD’s of these items. Of course borrowing it from the library would be far cheaper, but not nearly as convenient, and one would only have temporary access to them. With Audible I can download my books, play them on my computer at home, or transfer them to my iPod and listen to them on my commute to work, while out walking, etc. Because I can listen to them at other times, I feel like I am getting in extra time to read things when I normally would not be able to. Over the last several years by doing this I’ve been able to read over 100 books I think.

So, I was delighted when I found out that Audible had replaced their previous abridged version of Time and Again with a new unabridged one. Audible has tons of unabridged titles, but some of the publishers it deals with I suppose only put out abridged versions of their titles. Yet, as unabridged titles become available, Audible often replaces the abridged versions and even sometimes arranges for audio versions to be made of books that otherwise don’t have them.

Time and Again is one of those books that innately appeals to me because of my background and interests. So it seems odd that I would have waited so long to read it, but there you have it. First off, it takes place in New York City, Manhattan, where I grew up. Second of all, it deals with time travel, a subject that fascinates me endlessly (my favorite movie is 12 Monkeys). Thirdly, it deals with the New York City of the 1800’s, and illustrates these at least partly through old sepia photographs that have always fascinated me, especially considering my love of photography. And finally, of course, the fact that this was a book I was supposed to have read 20 odd years ago.

The book, as I’ve mentioned is about time travel. Simon Morley is a 28-year-old art director in an advertising agency (another link since my father was both an art director as well as a photographer) not very happy with his life or career. He’s been seeing a woman and thinks one day they may get married but doesn’t seem very excited about the prospect. His job of drawing insipid adds for soap and other products does not exactly fill him with excitement. He is then seemingly randomly approached by a stranger. This amiable man convinces Simon to come to a meeting where he is given some tests and let in on a secret government project involving time travel. Simon, in the beginning anyway, sees himself agree to joining the project almost as if he’s watching someone else and not actively making the decision himself.

What ensues is Simon’s adventures in the past and the common theme of whether one can affect the past (and thus the present), and more to the point whether one should. These themes always get me thinking and continue to occupy my mind way after seeing a movie or reading a book that uses them. Like I’m sure almost everyone else, I sometimes imagine how life would be different for me if I could go back in time and tell myself or my parents something that would affect the way they raised me or what I did with my life early on. Actually, the fantasy of simply waking up one morning in my childhood bed a the age of, say, 7, but with my current memories, is sometimes even more compelling, but I suppose not as often shared by others as simply going back in time to give forewarnings. Of course what I always come to realize about these things is that while alleviating some issues, they would also mean that most of my current friends, even my wife, would not know me. Sure I could somehow look these people up and try to establish relationships with them, but it would be artificial. They would be wholly different relationships if I could even establish them at all. Knowing that I would be losing those current valued relationships is enough to stop me and decide that maybe the devil I know is much better than the devil I don’t!

Getting back to the book, I had a curious experience with it. The book deals with Simon’s own “cultural immersion” but into a different time rather than place. He was constantly having to adjust his thinking about what he previously took for granted, let go of some stereotypes of the past, etc. In an ironic way, though, I had the same difficulty adjusting to the cultural differences simply between my current time in the 21^st century, and the time that Finnie wrote this book, around 1970, or almost 35 years ago! While many of the modernisms that Simon goes on about in his comparisons between his current day and the past that he is visiting are still here today, many are long gone. The most noticeable difference is his attitude towards women. Apparently all the government people heading the project have “girls” and Simon often speaks of them in a way that while not blatently condescending, certainly indicates that he is still of a time where women are seen as having predefined roles different from men and can be neatly all pigeonholed in this way and others. The appearance of women is also a main focal point of their characters, although he certainly does finally break through that to explore the innerworkings of some of the more central female characters. The other very noticeable difference is that instead of using the term “Blacks” or “African Americans” he uses the pretty antiquated term of “Negroes” which really makes him sound from another time! There are other issues like this, but in all, it almost seemed like I was looking back on an old recounting of someone who was then recounting something from a yet more distant time. Did this double filter distort things? Perhaps. It was at least to some extent distracting. But the overall story was entriguing enough that I was able to get past this issue.

The main other thing that bugged me about this was how the actual time travel worked. I remember back in high school when first trying to read it being very excited because the method was very accessible to me. Now I just find it hokey and incredibly unscientific and improbable. Not that time travel is probable to begin with, but the way it is explained in this book, it’s almost as if a significant chunk of the population could do it in their living room if they new the “secret code.” I won’t tell you the actual method in case you want to read it yourself, but suffice it to say, it’s a bit silly.

The book was narrated by Paul Hecht, and while not terrible, I thought him pretty mediocre as a narrator. Up until the last third of the book, I thought he really only had one voice. He might sound a bit rougher for some characters, but otherwise there wasn’t much difference in intonation, accent, etc. Finally there were some characters who had irish or other ethnic accents which he simply couldn’t ignore because these accents were referenced in the text. Luckily they were only a few lines so he could not butcher them too much. There were also some words that he simply pronounced wrong. One in particular I just couldn’t understand because it’s not an uncommon word by any means: grimace. Instead of putting the accent on the first syllable and pronouncing it like “grim-iss,” he pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable as “grim-ais.” Perhaps that is an alternate pronunciation of the word, but I’d never heard it, so it sounded as if he simply didn’t know how to pronounce a fairly common word.