Saturday, September 18, 2010

Audiobooks suck...

... or, at least, they suck in the following ways:

1) You can't make notes and/or underline text,

2) You can't skip the elaborate description of a tea-cosy* midway through the first part of the book, a description which the author has specifically chosen to illustrate the theme, in his novel, of the way individual freedoms are negated by the lack of energy and creativity required to make them worthwhile,

3) Most importantly, you can't circle, in red or black ink, the weightless, crabwise, inordinately long sentence, which begins, as it must, in the ostensible present, in the female protagonist's capitalistically oriented thoughts, and continues, as it only can, into a "brilliant" explication of her consciousness in the third person, an explication such as can only have originated, incongruously enough, from the author's literal-minded private-college-educated meditative mind, and not---as perhaps would have been more appropriate---from the character herself.

PS: Reading the audiobook version of Franzen's Freedom.

*Disclaimer: In Franzen's novel, no such tea-cosy actually exists.

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