Bks Abr

Lawrence Block suggests you skip audiobooks narrated by, uh, Lawrence Block:

Nowadays the abridgments are longer—six hours on four cassettes, or a little over 50,000 words. The work of narration is still demanding. You have to stay in the moment; if your mind wanders, it shows in your voice. But it's not as exhausting, and I have to say I'm getting better at it.

But I won't record an abridged audiobook again. Nor will anybody else narrate a book of mine in abridged form. There's going to be a clause to that effect in the next contract I sign. No abridgments.

Because it's been an embarrassment to me that I can't recommend my own audiobook narrations, but instead find myself steering prospective readers to the unabridged versions with other narrators. The audiobook I recorded of All the Flowers Are Dying runs 53,000 words; the unabridged version, which Alan Sklar will narrate for BBC America, runs to 99,000 and change. Anyone who listens to my version will get the story. They'll know what happens, although a whole subplot's been excised, but they'll miss far too much of what most concerned me as a writer. The book's the 16th in my Matthew Scudder series, and what the book is about, as much as its plot, is aging and mortality, and Scudder's response thereto. All of it grist, alas, for the abridger's mill. And how could it be otherwise? What sort of book could be cut essentially in half without losing a certain something?

Block seems a little more excited about audiobooks than YPTR; as he sez later: "audio is finding its audience, and we're just beginning to discover its potential impact. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if it helps resuscitate the short story. Short fiction, in great commercial decline since the end of the Second World War, lends itself perfectly to audio; you can have a complete reading experience in the course of a single commute."

Hey, it could happen!

(But won't.)