The Joys of the Celebrity Audiobook
For years, nobody could convince me to go the audiobook route instead of reading a book.
I gave it a try once. I decided I needed to get back into the classics and, with my always busy schedule, the audiobook might be the way to go while I was on public transportation or at the gym, giving me at least an hour a day to devote to a book. I chose A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and it was narrated by an actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company. What could be better than a literature classic read by a trained British actor?
It turns out, plenty. My mind began to wander right after the famous first lines: “It was the worst of times. It was the best of times.” It didn’t take me long to realize that I did not have any time to waste on this endeavor. Bye, bye, audiobooks. I was done.
Years passed and I continued to read actual books.
Then, this last fall, I so much wanted to read Barbra Streisand’s thousand-page tome, My Name is Barbra. As a celebrity, Babs checked all the boxes for me: I grew up listening to her records and watching her movies; I loved her intrepid approach to her projects; we agreed on politics; and she was a gay icon. And the memoir took ten years to write and she was eighty-one. She certainly must have had a lot to say.
