Audiobooks

I used to listen to audiobooks quite a lot. After I bought a car in Korea, I needed to listen to something other than the radio, which oddly enough was in a language foreign to me.
The noises that passed for pop music over there caused me to  bleed from the ears, and eventually my head would explode in a welter of gore. If I didn't want to end up cleaning the car like Vince and Jules, I needed an alternative to K-Pop.
So I bought an iPod, and filled it with my kind of music. And then I had the idea of adding books so I could listen to them, too. I think my favourite books to listen to were the Harry Potter's read by Stephen Fry. It helps if the person reading the book for you has a good voice, and Fry's is delightful.
I remember the episode of "Seinfeld" where George gets an audio textbook because he can no longer sit down and read a book. The audio textbook is read by someone with a voice that sounds like George's own, however, high and whiny. Oh well.
I also listened to books by Churchill, Dashiell Hammett, Dickens, and P.G. Wodehouse. I listened to Dracula, I, Claudius, The Lord of the Rings, and War and Peace.
It was great, but I don't listen to audiobooks anymore. I think I burned myself out on them, besides having the misfortune to have the reader's voice turn out to be as bad as George Costanza's.
There were three sets of audiobooks that finally soured me on them.
The first was the five books that (so far) make up the "Game of Thrones" saga. I really enjoyed the mini-series, despite some facebook mook revealing the ending. So I downloaded the rest of the series from Demonoid and set about finding out what happened next.
As I said, the reader had a really annoying voice. His Khal Drogo sounded like one of those B-movie Russian commie villains, and not at all very heoric. His women were even worse. About as sexy as Keith Richards' voice.
The best voice he did was for the crow mascot of the Black Knights on the Wall. He did that croak very well.
But I persevered, and tried to make sense of what was happening in Westeros, and what might happen next. SPOILER ALERT! I centred on Eddard Stark's son as the "hero" of the tale, and I figured he would be the final victor until I listened to the the disaster that befell him and his mother at the Red Wedding.
That episode really took me by surprise, and I don't think I've recovered from it even yet.
The next set of books I listened to was the "Hunger Games" trilogy. I had never even heard of them until last fall, when a classmate told me how excited he was for the movie to come out. I took his enthusiasm for the book as a recommendation and downloaded the series.
The first book was okay, but it had the disadvantage of being read by a woman with the most unctuous voice imaginable. And the second book had a lot of mooning about by the main character, a teenaged girl. She was unsure about which boy she loved more, and spent a lot of time agonizing over her choice. I started to think of this series as another version of "Twilight." That was enough to put me off right there, but I soldiered on and eventually finished the series.
I can just about tell you what happened.
The third book that did it for me was Stephen King's "The Stand," which I really enjoyed reading when it first came out. The audio version was another matter. The reader had an annoying habit of mispronouncing words and names. For example, Nadine didn't come out as "Nay-deen," but as "Nah-deen," and so on.
I got so fed up that I didn't even finish listening to the book, and I haven't even thought about listening to a book from that day to this. Maybe some day, but when? Who can say?