[chilmers]

If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.

[loloquwowndueo]

Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?

[toyg]

Listening to someone talking is how humanity transmitted culture and stories for tens of thousands of years. The fact that "we" cannot tolerate it anymore, is a sign of how badly our brains are being reshaped (or maybe damaged) by screens.

[TeMPOraL]

OTOH, fire, writing and sanitation are significant upgrades to what we were doing "for tens of thousands of years".

State of nature isn't inherently good. It's bloody, smelly, dirty, and only incidentally nice, by virtue of evolutionary path dependence.

[toyg]

Oral transmission of complex culture is one of the things that separates us from "the state of nature". As we lose it, we move further away from the beasts that conquered the planet and closer to the squirrel.

[TeMPOraL]

Transmission of complex culture is what separates us (and enables this complex culture in the first place); oral medium is merely one way to do it. Being the first one, it's probably not the best.

[toyg]

Considering it's the only medium that needs literally nothing but ourselves to work, I disagree with your statement. But to each its own.

[m463]

I think a long drive in the car is complemented exceptionally well by audiobooks.

and audiobooks with really good narrators? the miles will melt away.

(I like Wil Wheaton)

(don't know about lotr oudiobooks)

(currently part way through we are legion read by ray porter)

[kbutler]

We had tried video in the car for our teens, but found that audio books worked a lot better - shared experience, nobody has a bad angle/line of sight, can still see the scenery and engage in the travel, less looking down prompting motion sickness, etc.

Though now that everybody has a device, we have to intentionally opt for a shared experience, rather than 1:1 devices.

[Dylan16807]

An audiobook is bad if you want to go extra slow. I don't think I want to go that slow.

The article advocates not rushing. In general, that's a good fit for audiobooks.

[crazygringo]

The article literally says:

> limiting myself to mouth-speed

Audiobooks are mouth-speed.

The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author.

Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.

[gryson]

And if you keep reading (at whatever speed), you get to the actual point of the article:

>So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.

[WhyNotHugo]

Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause. When reading slowly, I often want to pause a few seconds and think about what I just read before moving on to the next sentence.

[crazygringo]

I pause audiobooks all the time by squeezing the base of my earbud, or pressing the big pause button on my Bluetooth speaker. Works great. As well as the triple-tap to go back 15 seconds to hear something again.

[ceejayoz]

> Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause.

You can’t pause your audiobooks?

[BloondAndDoom]

Not the OP, but to me audio generally x2 slower than I read, so I’m content with the speed, anything slower than that would be weird pace for many stuff.

Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks

[baobun]

Not each sentence but I do regularly pause and sometimes skip back in audiobooks, yes.

[qwertytyyuu]

Use the playback speed settings, tough hitting pause every once in a while is also a good idea

[Zenbit_UX]

First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.

Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.

Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?

[loloquwowndueo]

Interesting how in your second paragraph you do exactly the thing you said not to do in your first.

[UltraSane]

Audible and most audiobook player apps let you control the speed. I usually listen at 1.25 to 1.5

[bigiain]

That to me, feels opposite the the article's advice.

And I too, often watch youtube at 1.5x or 2x speed, and dislike audiobooks because I read so much faster that I can possibly listen to them, and there's always an ever growing list/pile of books I want to read after this one. I wonder if that's why a certain type of movie works so well for me - I think of them as "movies made from short stories, not novels", and now I'm wondering if it's something similar to the OP's idea - and that spending 2 hours watching a short story I'd expect to read in 15/20mins is what I'm enjoying, in a different way to, say, the new Dune movies - which so far have been 4-5 hours watching a couple of big novel's worth of story that'd take me a week or so to read? Just writing that out now, I realised theres a two orders of magnitude difference in speed there going from 1/10th of reading speed to 10x reading speed - from a 15 minute read to 2 hour watch, to a week long read to 4-5 hour watch. Hardly surprising they hit my brain differently.

[UltraSane]

Audiobooks are awesome because I can listen to them while doing other things like walking or biking or lifting weights. And the best narrators actually improve the books like The Hail Mary Project and Blood Meridian.

[teiferer]

That's the exact opposite of what the article is about. The desire to time optimize, to rush it cause "this is sooo sloooow, booooring" is what creates only an illusion of time efficiency but you might discover that if you actually give it the time, there is a whole world to discover. That's what the article is about.

[UltraSane]

Reading books as slow as the article says is rather silly.

[teiferer]

You are free to have that opinion and I personally also find it a little too extreme, but the author's main point is a good one.

[satvikpendem]

Then just use 0.75 or 0.5x speed? I don't understand this question.

[anywhichway]

It isn't just how fast or slow it is. Reading at a slow pace gives you time to think in a way that is flexible from sentence to sentence.

To borrow the same analogy from the article, image trying to savor a meal where someone else was deciding when you take each bite. Even at a slow pace, the rigidness of the pace and your lack of fine control would still pose a problem with giving each bite it's rightful consideration.

That being said I love audio books and think I would struggle to apply this article's advice in my own life. Slowing down your audiobook is still a step in that direction, though I sometimes find that slowing it down can cause my mind to wander and my comprehension goes down and not up.

[retsibsi]

> Then just use 0.75 or 0.5x speed?

I think this often sounds unsettling (like the reader is drunk or otherwise impaired), and anyway the listener doesn't need more time to recognise each individual word -- they want time to take in sentences and paragraphs.

[satvikpendem]

Get a text to speech app and change the lengths between sentences while keeping the actual read aloud speed the same, I recall using something like that before.

[sublinear]

I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.

[bigiain]

For me, "overindulgent and annoying" is way too harsh. But they feel _sooooo_ slow and I kind of resent "missing out" on the other books I could have read while the audiobook plods along (even at chipmunk 2x babble speed).

[Uvix]

I save audiobooks for times when I couldn't have read something else - while doing chores, driving, etc. - so I can avoid that "missing out" feeling.

[zem]

for lotr in particular my last reread was slower paced because I kept this map[0] open and paused frequently to refer to it and see where everyone was. it was super enjoyable, I have literally read the book dozens of times before that and have never gotten so good a sense of the world's geography and the difficulty of various journeys.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/100n0y/maybe_t...

[xeonmc]

Is the entire thing narrated in Gollum’s voice?

[taberiand]

He does lots of different voices, it's very good

[sethammons]

> "Fly-ses you foool-ses", exclaimed stupid, dry tricksy one

[sgt]

I guess he gets the Gollum parts just perfectly.