audioBooks | Care's Books and Pie

Another Tuesday, another random post of randomness.

I am a few pages in to 1Q84 Book Two.

Yesterday was International Pie Day but I didn’t make a pie. Shocker?! I just wasn’t feelin’ it. And I have almost a full 9×13 pan of cheesecake sopapillas sitting in the fridge. This delectable dessert is made of 2 blocks of cream cheese, a stick of butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar and 2 packages of crescent rolls. I really don’t want to be the only person in the house eating that AND a pie.

I’ll make a pie on PI DAY, March 14. (I hope anyway.)

Now for the whining.

Last week, under fabulous advice from some of my Tweet-Friends who love audio books, I was inspired to purchase a Creative Labs ZEN Mosaic EZ100. I bought the refurbished one advertised for about half off the *NEW* retail price which unfortunately means that I don’t have any guide books included and I can’t find any serial or models numbers so I am having difficulty with registering the product and getting into the website. I know I’m whining and frustrated and good things do not come of poor attitudes like the one I’m exhibiting but I don’t know quite what to do. I’m tempted to take the thing down to BestBuy under the guise of buying a charger but hoping I can get a live person to show me which buttons to push to make the thing work.

Let me back up a day or two further… I had on my New Year’s Goals to FIND my husband’s MP3 player so that I can make my wish of listening to books come true and I did! I found it! It’s a SONY and more than a few years old.

So, I followed the enticing ads to subscribe to Audible.com and get my free book. I selected BossyPants by Tina Fey.

And being stupid and assuming that all mp3 players play audio books, I plugged the thing in and attempted to move my new audiobook to my player. NOPE. Incompatible. Sony doesn’t like to play with others. So now I have a book I can’t listen to unless I play it on my Mac which totally defeats what I want to do which is walk the dogs or mow the lawn.

That’s when I went on to Twitter to seek advice.

Thus the *new* mp3 player from Creative. I got it to charge. YAY. That worked fine. I dropped/dragged BossyPants to it. YAY. I see it! It’s there! I work the menu to select and hit play.

Nothing.

It says NOW PLAYING in the upper right hand corner. It shows a progress bar across the bottom. It even has the scary pic of Tina with the big hands in the background. Nothin’. Rather than a green arrow, I see an orange square. And that’s it. I don’t know what else to do.

I downloaded the Guide book from the website but I don’t think they had a Mac option – it’s just garbled mess. [FIRST CLUE? or do I need a shovel slammed to my head.]

I am waiting for an email from Creative but it took so long for it to be accepted without serial and model numbers in the form that I don’t know what canned “we-can’t-help-you-without-proper-documentation’ response I might get.

Do you know anyone with a ZEN Mozaic EZ100? or do I just find a middle school kid and have them figure it out? Help?

oh hell. I give up. Just going to send it back and buy an iPod. I just saw in the Forums that the Zen and Macs don’t play well together. Why did I assume that this should be easy?

An original poem penned (typed? digitally created?) by yours truly on a late afternoon while wishing I could call and yap about this book to someone:

Between and betwixt
the cartwheeling leaves flee down the street at dusk
on a cruel sharp breeze.
yet bouts of calm sinisterness seem in hiding,
in waiting between breathes to inflict upon the senses.

Oh woe is me, this confusion these horrors!
of listening to the self-important ramblings and prolongations of the start of a story
that is the listening experience
of an audio book
called Frankenstein.

♦ ♦

So. Earlier this afternoon; it’s raining. I’m on my way to Plymouth Mass to go to the nearest Petco dog-washing station to give Oscar a bit more scrubbing and deskunking and I’m listening in the car, right? Are you with me? And I’m only three quarters paying attention wondering if I probably shouldn’t have the cruise-control on since the road is wet and it’s blowing pretty good and how to get this rambling old dude to just hurry up already about the studies of the ancient silly scholars and just tell me about the creature when my mind must have wandered off and then, I’m listening to …

“I had worked nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Um wait. Just like that? you study this and that and work in your lab and all the sudden you have a real live IT-thing wake up on you and you’re… UPSET about it?

OK.

I must tell you that when I first began this audio, I had to pop out the CD and make sure I was really listening to Frankenstein. What’s with the Russia stuff and planning a trip, and expedition to the North Pole? I was confused.

Why is the year “Seventeen ____ (pause/blank line/dash)” on the correspondence? Which character is narrating this?

Finally, I figured out that the sailing Captain wasn’t Frankenstein but that they picked up Mr. Frankenstein near death and certainly without chance of survival/rescue, but.

We aren’t really even told the guy is Frankenstein until further in and quite gently ‘dropped in’, in my opinion.

Actually, I’m having fun with the language – all a bit flowery and pretentious to my ears but then I’m not ‘of’ the early 1800’s. I’m of the late 1900’s. Groove on, dude.

Have you ever wondered about the word CREATive and the word CREATure? Interesting, no? no?

Help me if I begin to start talking like this: (I almost told my husband when he called just now that)

“Yes, the rain is falling, yet at varying intensities; I dare say it does not seem to threaten harm to our abode. Still, do take care when embarking on your journey homeward.”

The narrator of my audio book is Jim Weiss. He’s good; very dramatic. He reads lots of classics.

So I play with the forward and retreat or rather the de-advance of the audio to hear what I miss and I get to:

“It was on a dreary night of November, … With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

Well DON’T DO IT if you don’t want to!!!!

♦

And my title? Don’t you just love the imagery “livid with the hue of death”? Here’s the full quote on page 35 (yes, I have the book in hand right now, but not while I’m listening in the car, don’t worry.)

“Delighted and surprised, I embrace her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form , and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of flannel.”

Now if THAT isn’t a R.I.P. worthy quote, I don’t know WHAT is!

Got any creepy-crawly quotes gathered from YOUR RIP experience so far?

And so we begin the month that is October. Dewey’s Read-a-thon is coming up! (Oct 9) Boston Book Fest is the weekend after that!

I’m currently reading a library book Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster which was my BBAW Forgotten Treasure but golly is it long – at 548 pages, hardback, not tiny font but small enough. Luckily, it is just the right amount of captivating.

My September Summary is SIX books, most for RIP (4), two being for my Real Life Book Club, The Bookies. No nonfiction. I think my nonfiction count is down from last year. I just ordered Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf which I want to read to finish up the Women Unbound Challenge, which is winding down (and miserably ignored of late) and due to end on November 30, 2010. REMIND ME to post something over there…

I’m rather bummed that I didn’t read a Banned Book for this week’s Banned Book Week (whoa – was that redundant?) especially when my niece asked me on Facebook if I did. Surely some idiots with too much time on their hands banned The Maltese Falcon at some point, right? But I couldn’t find it on any list during the 10 minutes I searched. Happy BBW if you are celebrating.

This should give anyone more than enough fodder for something to comment on. or I’ve overwhelmed you all! Blog at you next week…

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