The Himrich Library, 9/29/24
The joys of audiobooks, seasonal reading and a busy October.
Hello again!
Here's a fun fact about me which may surprise you—for the longest time in my adult life, I refused to listen to audiobooks. Never did it willingly. Why? I told myself it was an attention span issue: my mind tends to go wandering when I'm listening to something, and when I'm reading a book, I like to absorb as much of the text as I can. I'm the kind of person who will pick apart paragraphs and read sentences multiple times to glean extra meaning from them. Audiobooks, for obvious reasons, aren't really conducive to that syle of reading. So no audiobooks for me, I decided at some point. Even if that meant I didn't finish as many books as I would like.
Recently, however, I found myself in need of something to help fill the 90-ish minutes that I spent commuting to and from work each weekday. I hate the morning radio, and there are only so many CDs I can carry in my car. So when I happened across an audio copy of a book that I'd been wanting to check out for a while, I thought to myself, "Oh, what the hell...why not?"
Much to my surprise, listening to that book became one of the most fun activities I'd done in recent months. I found that audiobooks were more suitable for me than I had thought, and that I now had a new hobby to help me pass the time while driving.
Rather than running the risk of losing key details by getting distracted and zoning out, I realized that using an audiobook actually helped me pay better attention to the text. When the words are passing by at a predetermined pace, I actually have more motivation to hang on every word. It also helps that listening to books like this brings back my memories of being read to each evening as a child. I've been experiencing new books and rediscovering old favorites using my new hobby. So if you were like me and you've been hesitant to try audiobooks for the reasons I originally listed, maybe stop by your local library and pick up a book just to see what the experience is like—you might find that you've been missing out.
What I'm Reading
- Incidentally, the title which turned me on to audiobooks was David Grann's The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. It comes HIGHLY recommended by yours truly, and you're sure to love it if you have an interest in the subgenre of "bad things happen to people on a historical ocean voyage." Written by the author of the equally excellent Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager tells the true story of an ill-fated 18th-century British military expedition, specifically what happened when one boat in the fleet became shipwrecked off the coast of South America. This book is compelling, meticulously researched and serves as sobering reminder of the horrors that imperialism forced upon not only the people it subjugated, but the citizens it claimed to be benefitting.
- Man, something about the last section of Hill House hit me way harder this time around than it did on my first reading several years ago. In particular, I was struck by just how well Jackson ratchets up the surreal/psychological horror in the final three chapters of the story. Up to that point, we've been seeing events from Eleanor's POV, but we've still had one foot in reality at the same time. By the climax, however, the reader is fully immersed in Eleanor's broken psyche, and it is a sad, scary place to be. The scene on the library staircase is so intense that even though I knew how the book ended, I found myself in suspense, thinking "I know nobody dies here, but holy shit...!" And of course there is the ending, where an unsuspecting reader might be fooled into thinking that poor Eleanor will escape Hill House with at least her life, if not her sanity—but her story can only end in the way that it does.
- Inspired by the announcement of a library book club meeting early next month, I have undertaken a momentous task: read as much of Bram Stoker's Dracula as I can before next Wednesday. This task is more for my own amusement than out of a need to revisit the text before discussing it. I can probably discuss and analyze Dracula in my sleep by this point. Still, it's been fun, even if the Audible recording leaves something to be desired. I'm currently on Chapter 7, and the doomed ghost ship Demeter is about to crash into the Whitby shore, unleashing the vile Count Dracula on English soil. Good times, good times...
What I'm Writing
If you follow news about the writing community, then I suspect you're already aware about the ongoing downfall of NaNoWriMo. To make a long story short, the well-established nonprofit, which runs a yearly event encouraging people to write a 50,000-word novel in November, has torpedoed its credibility with a lot of authors by refusing to condemn the use of generative AI in fiction writing, even going so far as to suggest that doing so would be "classist and ableist." This statement, combined with another recent controversy involving the organization's lack of proper forum moderation, has resulted in many sponsors and supporters of the event jumping ship. Board members are resigning, high-profile authors like Erin Morgenstern and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are cutting ties with the organization, and many other writers who have previously participated in NaNo—myself included—have turned away from the organization in disgust.
So, how does this affect what I'm currently writing? Well, NaNo may be going down in flames, BUT there's some good news: the concept of trying to write a certain number of words in the span of one month isn't owned by any single person or group, so we can all do our own NaNos! And they don't even have to be in November, either!
Inspired by an upcoming writing event I heard of called Ominous October, I'm planning to write at least 20,000 words' worth of horror content during the coming month. My goal is a minimum of 714 words per day, which comes out to 5,000 words a week + three days off at the end of the project. I have a novella idea that I'd like to work on, but I'm also tempted to use some of the prompts outlined in the above post. Either way, there will definitely be something for you to read by the time I'm done. I will post my progress updates here: if you subscribe to my newsletter, you can learn more about what I'm working on, read the final drafts of my stories or poems and maybe even see the in-progress versions of them as well.
That's all for now. Have a wonderful week, and I'll see you next month!
—Dana
