Saturday, February 8, 2025

Listen to Audiobooks at As Fast or Slow as You Want

 by

Scott D. Parker

A couple of weeks ago on NPR, I ran across an article entitled “Is there a right way – or wrong way – to listen to an audio book?” and I gave it a read. The article spotlights a TikTok video from Audible where various celebrities discuss their preferred speed of listening to content.

What surprised me was the number of folks who think 1x (i.e., normal) speed is the only preferred method. One person even commented “I think people who go real fast are - I don't want to say psychopath, but...” I have to admit it irritated me.

I am an avid listener of audiobooks and podcasts. Of the 34 books I got through in 2024, 31 of the were audiobooks. Basically, if there’s a book I want to read, I see if there’s an audio version first. When the guys from my SF book club make their picks, I instantly download the audiobook. Side note: I love when my friends pick the books because I can download the audio and just push play, having never read the book description, a habit I call Reading into the Dark.

When There's Not Enough Time

When it comes to those SF books, sometimes they're long and, depending on what other book I may be listening to, there may not be enough days in the month left to finish the assigned book. If the book is not good, I pull the rip cord and just stop listening. But for those books I'm enjoying yet I'm running out of time, it's time to bump up the narration. I ended up listening to the most recent novel, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, at 1.4x. Fast enough to hear and digest everything but also speedy enough to complete the novel.

When The Narration Is Slow

Sometimes, an audiobook narrator makes a decision to read the book slower than I'd like. My default is about 1.2 to 1.25x. This is a nice, natural pace for my brain and ear. It has the effect of shrinking the silences between sentences.

Sometimes, the faster tempo of my listening brings a little bit extra to the experience. There have been more than a few books in which a faster narration lends itself to more punchy dialogue, especially for those romances with two witty characters. 

The Always-Natural Narrators

Scott Brick is my favorite audiobook narrator. Whenever I get a book with him--like Brad Meltzer's novels and histories and the works of Clive Cussler--I listen to Scott naturally.

Ditto for celebrities who read their own work. Dave Grohl, Henry Winkler, Ron and Clint Howard and, as of this week, Alton Brown. I know how they sound and I want to hear them naturally.

You Read More Books

When you speed up narration, you finish books faster. And then you can read the next book. Who doesn't like that?

This Shouldn't Even Be a Thing

When we buy a book or download an audiobook, that piece of content is now owned by us. It has left the writer's keyboard and brain and become either an ebook, a paper book, or an audiobook. 

And we readers and listeners can do with that product whatever we want. When I read, I annotate like crazy, especially non-fiction. I underline passages and make notes in the margins. Heck, I even do that for ebooks.

Plus, readers read at all different speeds, so there's no natural 1x speed of reading. So there shouldn't be a "norm" for audiobooks. 

You consume at the speed you want, and don't let anyone say anything differently. 

The Drunken Version?

By the way, all this talk of bumping up the narration leads to another question: anyone ever slowed down an audiobook to 0.5 speed? It's kind of fun. The narrator sounds drunk, something I learned while listening to The Ralph Report podcast (where host Ralph Garman slows down rants by co-host, Eddie Pence, to make Eddie, a non-drinker, sound drunk). 

Anyone want to hear a "drunk at the end of a bar" tell you a story?

Saturday, February 1, 2025

The Monthly Reset and Dodging Curve Balls

By

Scott D. Parker

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about giving yourself the grace to start, stop, and then restart a habit. That was just after Quitter’s Day 2025.

 

Today is 1 February 2025. It’s been thirty-one days since New Year’s Day. How are you habits coming along? How’s that new story or book working out for you?

 

I picked up an older story sitting at around 10,000 words on 1 January and, as of yesterday, I reached achieved a hair more than 21,000 new words. Not quite the pace I imagined as I opened my laptop early on New Year’s Morning—I frankly expected at least 31,000—but those are 21,000 new words I didn’t have. So that’s a win and I’ll proudly wave the flag.

 

It’s important we celebrate our victories, both large and small, because things can change your life in the blink of an eye. Like it did for me this past week.

 

My day job changed our in-office policy from hybrid (in office Tuesday through Thursday; work from home on Mondays and Fridays) to the full five days in the office. Naturally, after three-plus years of that kind of working routine, everyone is having to adjust.

 

But aside from the disruptions and the adjustments and the very obvious blessing of still having a job, a silver lining appeared.

 

On my WFH days, I would always each lunch and play games (backgammon and Yahtzee; 3 games each) with my wife. Now, I truly miss those times, but I quickly realized that with me being in the office, I have two additional hours of writing. It doesn’t easily equate to the missing time with the wife, but my writer self can be two hours more productive.

 

Now, fellow writer, we face a new month, one with a nice and even twenty-eight days. What are your goals for this month? Mine is quite simple: forge ahead on the novel and write at least 21,000 new words. And, like I always say, if you’ve fallen off the writing wagon, all you have to do is the simplest thing possible.

 

Start.


Saturday, January 25, 2025

The JFK Conspiracy Few Know About is a Riveting Thriller You Won't Believe is True

By

Scott D. Parker

As a trained historian, I pride myself on having in-depth knowledge on certain topics of history and a general sense of a wide range of other topics. This book showcased an event I never knew about.

When I saw the title of Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch’s new book, The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy―and Why It Failed, I’ll admit it threw me. Was this a heretofore unknown account of that horrible day in 1963? Not at all. This is a retelling of another attempt on JFK’s life, this time in the weeks right after Election Day 1960.

What? How did I miss this story in all of my study of American and presidential history? Not sure. I knew about the attempt on Abraham Lincoln’s life as he made his way to the Washington DC in 1861 (see Meltzer and Mensch’s second book). I also knew about the attempted assassination of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and even the failed attempts on Harry Truman and Gerald Ford.  But Kennedy?

Absolutely.

I’ll admit: I could try my hand at describing this book, but in this case, I’m going to let their words speak for themselves:

On December 11, 1960, shortly after Kennedy’s election and before his inauguration, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick waited in his car―a parked Buick―on a quiet street in Palm Beach, Florida. Pavlick knew the president-elect’s schedule. He knew when Kennedy would leave his house. He knew where Kennedy was going. From there, Pavlick had a simple plan―one that could’ve changed the course of history.


As they have done in their previous conspiracy books, Meltzer and Mensch use present tense as their prose of choice. It provides the book with an urgent momentum, especially considering the vast majority of readers (like me!) don't know the story and are breathlessly turning the pages to find out what happens next. And why what Pavlick wanted to do never happened

I mention "turning pages" but with this book, as I have with all the conspiracy books, I opt for the audio. Why? Because the great Scott Brick narrates this book. By far my favorite narrator, Brick puts special emphasis on certain words that have the effect of drawing you even more into the story.

Jackie Kennedy is Nearly the Star of This Book

Having just lived through our own contemporary presidential transition, I found myself eating up all the little nuggets of history about the transition from the Eisenhower Administration to Kennedy's. Key in these few weeks is Jackie Kennedy, the pregnant wife of the president-elect.

Meltzer and Mensch describe her health, the intricacies of what needs to be done--and what is expected by society and tradition--her budding friendship with Clint Hill, her Secret Service agent, and the birth of John Jr. during Thanksgiving week. I made a point not to jump on the internet and look up Clint Hill and read his story, but I knew he was the agent who jumped on the back of the convertible in 1963. I found myself loving every moment about Jackie Kennedy in this book, and even wanted the two authors to continue past the timeframe of their book.

The Final Chapter: Its Vision and Mandate

Meltzer and Mensch do conclude their book, recounting the events of the successful assassination in 1963. It bookends the opening which recounts Kennedy's heroic efforts in 1943 on PT-109. They've taken us through the transition, described the characteristics and foibles of JFK, Jackie, and others, and delivered a stark yet empowering conclusion.

Life is messy. Human beings are messy and laced with contradictions. Kennedy's soaring rhetoric can fill our hearts with pride even though we know he could be petty and cruel to those he loved. But that's everyone, right? We're all human. We're all imperfect. We all have flaws, but it's what we do despite of or because of those flaws that propels us forward. 

The final words Meltzer and Mensch put in their book is actually from President Kennedy himself: 

"All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. 

But let us begin."