I have decided firmly that I really like audiobooks. It's quite convenient now that I have a little MP3 jukebox to just listen to a book everywhere I go. I really like reading, but when you listen to the book instead of read it, you can do other stuff while you read, so your life becomes so much more efficient. The other day, I "read" Steve Martin's "The Pleasure of My Company" (Recommended! Sweet and happy and quirky, but not quite as out-and-out funny as you'd expect from Steve Martin. The best part about the audiobook version as opposed to a print version was that Steve himself read it to me.) cover to cover while driving from DC to NYC to meet Shelly. I have "read" about two-thirds of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde in the past two days; I'll probably finish it tomorrow.

I like that the narrators do voices. Sometimes when you read a book, you forget that it's set in a certain area where the people are going to have a certain accent. That doesn't happen with audiobooks. If it's set in the South, the characters have a Southern accent. If it's set in England, they talk like Brits, the gentlemen with a smooth accent, and the lower classes with a rougher brogue.

I like that it's kind of halfway between a movie and a book. The story keeps going on at a steady pace, and there is certainly acting involved on the part of the narrator, but you still get the introspective, descriptive parts of a book, and you still get to use your imagination on the visuals and non-dialogue sound.

However, there is a problem. Audiobooks are hard to come across. The other day, I saw "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" on CD for $72.00. The print book is only $30-something. Why would you pay more than twice as much for the CDs? It's fun to listen to audiobooks, but it's not that much fun. $72.00 for one book? No thanks!

So that leaves us with the public library. I have scoured libraries in Alexandria and Cambridge since I started this new hobby, and I am disappointed with their offerings. Cambridge seems to have a pretty good selection on cassette, but who listens to cassettes anymore? I would prefer to have a CD (which I then rip to my computer and then upload to my Rio Karma), and the CD selections are sparse. I'll end up either having to listen to mediocre books that I've never heard of (like "The Notebook" by Nicholas Sparks, which, although it is now a movie, I still maintain is pretty mediocre and certainly doesn't live up to the billing on the back cover that it is a love story about old married people), or trying to find new libraries to raid.

My brother has a subscription to an online audiobook service that I suppose is my only hope once I've exhausted the local libraries. Why can't I "read" what I want to at a reasonable price?