Books on Ipod

I have been listening to some audiobooks on my ipod recently - I listened to The Shack on my way to North Carolina a few weeks ago. It took almost the whole trip there and back, but I finished it. I have started to listen to Mercy by Jody Picoult - its 17 hours long. Its going to take me a while to get through this one.

I love the idea of listening to a book - I love to read so I discovered this week that while I did the dishes and laundry I could just listen away. The only draw back is that you have to listen to the same voice for however many hours and on top of that, the narrator is using different inflections for different characters. So listening to a male narrator do a female voice or a female do a male voice can be a turn off. Which leads me to wonder if I would be capable of doing a better job. Which leads me to this memory...

The summer before my senior year of college my family and I went on vacation. We went with some family friends. We were going to a quiet little island off the gulf coast of Florida. A week of sun and sand. The catch was we would not be staying in a hotel or condo or house. We were basically going to be camping on this island for a week - as in take your own food, no hot water unless you boiled it and cold showers in a shower stall on the side of a bath house. I know most everyone will be thinking that this is NOT AT ALL what you call a vacation. But I will say that I like to camp. And going to this island sounded like an adventure.

Well.... let me tell you it was not the kind of adventure I would sign up for again. It was hot. There were mosquitos everywhere. We would go through a whole can of bug spray a day. The beach was not a beautiful sandy beach - but more of the broke up shell kind. And it stormed BADLY almost every night.

Maybe its because when you have a bad experience the good parts stand out even more, but one of my favorite memories has come from that trip. I took a few books to read that week and I'm not sure if it was during one of the bad storms or just a moment when no one had anything better to do, but at some point I picked up a book and started to read it out loud to everyone. And for whatever reason, everyone decided to listen. So throughout the week everyone would gather around and listen as I read more and more of the story until I finished. I didn't use different voices for the different characters. I don't even think I changed the tone of my voice depending on the situation. I just read. And people listened.

I have not found a narrator of a book that has reminded me of that moment. The book I read was The Five People You Meet in Heaven and it was a great book. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it yet.