My friend Ian sent me an email this morning that got me thinking. We live in an interesting age where popular authors become celebrities, and I know for myself, as someone who listens to a lot of audiobooks, something I really love is hearing an author read their own work. Neil Gaiman and Ray Bradbury are two examples Ive always enjoyed. I guess part of my thinking is always that the author knows where the emphasis lies - how things should be pronounced, how the sentences should flow. But (since many of my friends are heavy readers) this idea of the audiobook has really only come n in a big way since the invention of the cassette tape. We have a good handful of mid-century LPs from before then, usually with authors reading selections of their work (I have one of Tolkien reading selections from The Hobbit, for example). Dylan Thomas basically started it off in the 1950s when Caedmon lashed him to a microphone and made him record some dozen LPs. And there are a few *very* fractured examples from before then - I believe Edison recorded a few seconds of some of the great poets of his day on wax cylinder. But many, many, many great authors have been lost to the mists of time - we just dont know what they sounded like. So...what author would you like to be able to hear, even if it was only for, say, one minute? Id be pretty tempted to hear Charles Dodgson read a few of his own lines, although with his famous anxiety and stutter I doubt he could have been convinced to do it. Id love to hear a few moments from one of Dickens live orations. The actor William Gilette recorded his famed impression of Twain (whom he lived next to as a child) - it would be amazing to hear Twains own voice. Im not sure quite why hearing an authors voice seems to make them, at least for me, more real, but I guess the idea that they were real people - real people who thought up their stories or their poems using the same building blocks of words and phrases and pauses that we do - is kind of amazing to me. And hearing them read their own work just seems to...reveal something...about the prose, certainly (as I said above), but also about the person who engineered it.
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 15:17:26 +0000
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