The following is a list of the 34 audiobooks (for varying definitions of "book") that I have listened to in January through October, 2019. They are more or less in chronological order by listening date. (I say "more or less" because Amazon's content-management function lists items by purchase date, and while my Audible app
mostly lists by "last date you did something with this item," where "did something" can be either "listened to it" OR "purchased it" OR "downloaded it to your phone," sometimes parts of it glitch back to purchase order.)
Anyway, the list:
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1. The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World, by Robert Garland (Great Courses, 24 hours 28 minutes)
-----Or more accurately, in the ancient
Mediterranean world (Egypt, Greece, Rome, with a few digressions into Mesopotamia and Persia) and in medieval England. Garland's unexamined ethnocentrism grates after a while, but there's a bunch of useful information in here. (Just ignore most of what he says once he gets to the medieval period, particularly about the Vikings.)
2. Jingle Bell Pop, by John Seabrook (Audible free member offer, 1 hour 14 minutes)
-----A history of how/when/why various songs entered the "canon" of American Christmas music. Slight but entertaining.
3. Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 6 hours)
-----Which should probably be subtitled "maybe let's not skim over Mesopotamia and Anatolia/Persia so fast before diving into Greek history, hey?" This is fairly introductory level stuff, but well organized and interesting. Also, a note about Prof. Harl, since I have been listening to a bunch of his courses: he has a strong Brooklyn (or Brooklyn-adjacent) accent and a kind of strident speaking pattern, which I understand some listeners find off-putting, but which I find oddly endearing because it makes him sound like he's really into whatever he's talking about.
4. The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague, by Dorsey Armstrong (Great Courses, 12 hours 10 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. My one gripe is that Prof. Armstrong treats the course a bit too much like an actual college course where students can go several days between lectures and therefore includes a sort of five-minute "as we discussed in the previous lecture..." catch-up section at the start of each new lecture. This gets old fast if you're listening to a bunch in a row on a long drive. *wry* Other than that, very interesting and informative.
5. Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed, by Edwin Barnhart (Great Courses, 23 hours 15 minutes)
-----Fascinating and informative. You could easily make a whole course (or multiple courses) on any one of the cultures Prof. Barnhart discusses here.
( cut for length! )---------------
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You know, looking at it all together, that is a lot of hours. What's especially interesting is that they're all hours I also fill with other tasks, because I literally
cannot focus on audio-only input without something else to eat fidgety overflow. So I listen while driving, or while walking into work, or while cooking, or while doing laundry, or while raking leaves, or any number of random tasks. All of which are things I would be doing anyway, but adding the audio input makes those tasks less annoying because I no longer feel like "ugh, folding laundry is such a waste of time" since I am now Learning A Thing while doing a mindless chore.
Apparently the theme of 2019 for me is that this is the year I finally learned how to listen to audiobooks (and/or podcasts) and it improved my life in ways I was absolutely not expecting.
...Also, you have probably noticed that there is no fiction on this list. There's a reason for that, and it's that I am super-picky about narrative voice for fiction and also I get SO IMPATIENT at the pacing when I can't just read ahead at my own speed. I'm picky about nonfiction narrative voice, too, but less so. And lecture series are perfect because they're not a person reading
written prose -- they're just a person talking like a normal human being. Like, okay, they're talking from notes about a specific subject, but it's basically a college lecture recorded on tape, and I'm cool with a wide variety of professorial styles, so. *wry*
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