Becoming a Reader

Well written novels are a joy to read. What I recently found out is, that well written novels are a joy to read "out loud", as well. But let's start at the beginning.

My wife suffers from travelling sickness, i.e. whenever she is in a moving vehicle as a passenger for a certain while and in her case can see outside, she starts to feel queasy in the stomach and may even be sick. How long this takes depends on the circumstances. Generally, jerky driving style and crowdedness catalyse the process, one might say. The strongest catalyst of them all, however, is reading or watching something, like a film or so. Thus, she is condemned to just stand there and wait while wondering when she will be sick.

Making matters worse, she has to take the bus on several mornings per week to get to work... in rush hour. The procedure is always the same. Bus is never on time. One generally arrives when three or four should have been there already. Consequence many people, traffic jams, you get the idea. Obviously this is not very pleasant as you might imagine.

So I had an idea. You probably have guessed it by now. I own a headset, there are several recording programs out there. Some free of charge. My mp3 player is hardly in use nowadays. Therefore, I decided to record myself while reading a book out loud and put it on the mp3 player for her to listen to.

I started out with a short book that she liked, Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis". When I read this book, I was not used to recording myself and I was quite shy in the process. The result is a very monotonous drone of my voice. Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that I didn't like the book much, I don't know.

As the second book, I chose Terry Pratchett's "Mort" and now that I have gone past the weirdness of hearing my own voice recorded, I am really starting to enjoy it. Anyone who knows the book can now try to imagine the voice he would give Death. I think after another couple of sessions, I will need to change my vocal chords ;). The Klatchians fell victim to my bad Indian accent as I have no Arab one in my repertoire.
My main problem at the moment still is to a) remember what voice I have given to characters that do not appear often and b) find the right tone of voice. Very often it happens that I say something with a booming voice only to follow it up with a  "mumbled Mort."

She loves it, though, so I can still improve my little charade. It's fun while it lasts. I wonder what other books I will read for her...