Prior Bad Acts by Tami Hoag
My rating: 2/5 cats
do you know how long it takes to listen to audio books?? this one is eleven hours and thirty-nine minutes! and i am not one of you cyborg kids who have all manner of machines strapped to you and dangling off of your tool belts like a williamsburg batman. i can only listen to this in my house, doing the dishes or cooking etc. but—jesus—eleven hours!! of this guy’s voice!! as he raises the pitch to make lady-voices or baby-talks through a five-year-old character or slaps this comical minnesotan accent on for one cop, or gets gruff, or creepy, or MAKES THUNDER NOISES as the narrative requires. it’s like listening to a grown man play with dolls (and i have used that expression privately, to one of you goodreaders, and if you are reading this review, the association is intentional)
this is only my second audio book.* i have dfw reading brief interviews with hideous men, which is wonderful because it is his voice, and he knows how to read his own stuff, but i have great difficulty paying attention to the aural. in class, i pretty much write down everything teacher says because otherwise i will drift off and not remember anything but when i read my notes, i can remember it. hearing shit? i tune out, i daydream, it is not ideal for me. (i actually watch all my netflix with the subtitles on, because i find it helps me remember what happened) i had to start several chapters over because i had been having little dreamthoughts in my head that were entirely separate from the cd. audio must be great for you commuters who have to pay attention to the road and all. because i am chauffeured daily by the mta, i can read guaranteed a couple of hours a day, and not have to resort to this medium which limits my involvement by telling me where the inflections are. maybe as a reaction to the imaginative limitations, i misheard several lines and conjured up mental pictures different than intended:
“He let his gaze wander around the room”
“I’ve got a unit on the house”
“You’re a target”
“bucking wildly”
“see Kyle”
“She could feel his gaze on her”
“Headlights washed over them”
it is important to enunciate.
as for the book itself—what can i say? it is a perfectly serviceable thriller; it’s got a dead lady with flowers stuffed in a slit down her chest, some red herrings, an oddly schoolmarmish attitude towards pornography, and a bunch of dead bodies. it would have taken me far less time to read it than it did to listen to it, but the syllabus wants what the syllabus wants. sieg heil, indeed.
* except, of course, for this: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49…
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