I give up listening. Again.

I give up on audiobooks all the time. I listen in my car for 30-40 minutes and if the book isn't instantly compelling, but not so much that I drive into a lake, I eject the disk and go on to something else.

If I feel that the book deserves more time, because of its popularity or reputation, I might give it up to 2 hours before deciding to break off the engagement. It's rare for a book to lose me in that first half hour then get me back an hour later.

Often it's the actor doing the reading. I just don't want to listen to some people talk. Like maybe their performance doesn't match the way the words form in my head. Like I'm trying to listen to the author tell me a story, but this other person just keeps getting in the way with that voice. That often happens if the reader is using an accent.

But David Sedaris is great to listen to. Who'da thunk, with that voice of his? And Stephen Colbert, awesome. Some writers are just destined to perform.

The latest book I've given up on is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. But in this case, although I'm trying to blame the performer for his somewhat Southern or genteel manner he attributes to some characters, I realize that I just don't care about vampires. I don't care about them so much that even the prospect of a great and bloody war with them can't keep me from ejecting the disk and re-inserting some music. I believe you kids call it rock and roll.

Spoiler Alert.

So when this happens, I have to go online to find out if I'm going to miss anything really good by ejecting the book. And luckily, Wikipedia has pretty thorough summaries of many books and movies. And when I read the plot for Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, I realize I've made the right decision to abandon it. Thank God for libraries and all that free lending.

This is what convinced me:

"Lincoln follows a slave buyer and his new slaves back to their plantation and discovers to his horror that the buyer is a vampire - the slaves are to be used not for labor but for food. Lincoln writes in his diary his belief that vampires will continue to exist in America as long as they can easily buy their victims in this manner - to end slavery is to end the scourge of vampires."

And that bothers me. I agree with the first three paragraphs from the Wikipedia summary, so I'm guessing that they got this part right, too.

So in this book, Seth Grahame-Smith decides that slavery is bad because of vampires?

Earlier, a few escaped slaves attempt to steal Lincoln's boat, but he fought them off only to learn that they were trying to flee from their vampire master. And I could sense Lincoln's guilt at keeping them from gaining access to the craft for their escape even if it meant they might have taken his life in the process.

But to write an alternate history to say that the African slave trade expanded and that the Civil War was caused by vampires is kind of dumb, if not offensive.

The lesson we are supposed to learn from slavery and the Civil War is that we are all capable of great evils.

But even when the story attempts to fix this confusion about the causes of the war, the author tells us, "Lincoln decides that the best way to defeat the vampires is to eliminate their food source and starve them out- to that end, he announces the Emancipation Proclamation and encourages the slaves to fight back against slave owners and vampires alike."

Starve them out? Their food supply? The only reason slaves were the preferred food supply is because they could be purchased, eaten and killed without raising any alarms because no one cared what happened to a slave, which was simply a person's property.

Without slaves, there would still be many poor white farmers and laborers, even Native Americans, who could be eaten. And because this part of the story seems so ill-thought-out, I'm tempted to advance to that part of the book to hear what and how that really plays out. (But not so tempted that I'd actually do it.) It just doesn't make sense, so maybe the Wikipedia entry is oversimplifying things. But I guess I'll never know.

Anyway, this is not an actual review since I admit to only listening to a small portion of the book. But it was enough to help me decide to move on to something else. Maybe The Hunger Games. Although I also tried to listen to Gregor the Overlander (the same author), but gave up on that after 20 minutes. I wanted away from that story pretty much as soon as I started it.

But that's the difference for me between audiobooks and print books. With print, I can flip through the pages very quickly and scan ahead to see if maybe there's a part where I can jump back in. I took a speed reading class in school and used a machine that projected words on the wall and I could dial up the speed to 1200 words a minute. And I remember every book I read after I learned to read faster. For example, The Red Badge of Courage begins, "cold earth fogs liquid feet hostile hills." It's a story about a jogger or a marathon runner, or something.

With an audiobook, I can only advance then listen. Advance, then listen. It doesn't help me to find a good spot to get back into the story. So I quit. If only I had speed hearing, but sound travels so slowly.

Money for Suck.

Here is an interesting proposal from Alex Beam of The Boston Globe: libraries should buy e-book readers for their patrons to show them how they suck.

He didn't actually say any of that, but he said to buy readers to show everyone "the possibilities and limitations of digital books."

Here is the full paragraph for context:

I worry that libraries, even the newest ones, risk becoming fortresses buttressed by books, protecting Gutenberg’s technology for reasons of principle rather than pragmatism. Librarians need to educate themselves, and us, about the possibilities and limitations of digital books. Right now, the Jeff Bezoses of the world - he is the rosy-eyed, huckster boss of Amazon - have the stage to themselves, and, as I write, consumerist lemmings are dropping $200 to $250 for e-readers, mainly because they are well promoted.

I understand his point. Like many libraries, we offer Overdrive ebooks to our patrons. But we don't have readers for them to borrow to experience what an ebook is and whether they might want to buy themselves a reader.

This is one area where libraries are ahead of the curve to the disadvantage of our patrons. We offer a service whereby they need to spend a lot of their own money to enjoy. In the past, from what I remember, libraries added DVDs to the collection after most people already had the players in their homes. And if someone still doesn't have one, he can get one from Kmart for around $20. And basic mp3 players for downloadable audiobooks are now around the same affordable price.

This is a similar situation with the computers we provide: these are big ticket items that many people can't afford. So the library buys computers and software to try to narrow the gap between the digital haves and the have-nots.

But with a new service like ebooks, once the library adds them to the collection through a company like Overdrive, it's like the library is choosing to actively ignore the set of our patrons who can't afford the readers. I can't think of another service we offer where the patron needs an expensive gadget to join the party.

So libraries should add this cost to the total budget for ebook subscriptions. If you have $20,000 for ebooks, pull off $3,000 for readers, and circulate those, too.

And maybe our patrons won't care about ebooks once they get a taste of them. Maybe they'll go back to their old reliable dead trees.

Or maybe libraries, as we currently know them, will cease to exist, replaced by download stations and a few USB cables, or a wi-fi hub and some vending machines.

No, I don't don't think an ebook reader could replace me. Unless there's a model that breaks down all the time and whose battery overheats and catches fire, then, yeah, my job is over.

What? I say, what?

My father never read to me, but when I watch Monk, I weep for the man with the soothing voice whom I never knew.

Digital audiobooks, especially those narrated by talented artists, can "extend the pleasure of being read to by your parents into 5th, 6th, 7th grades," he [Katz] says. And talented artists are lining up to narrate — Macmillan Audio launched a children's list this spring with narrations by Gwyneth Paltrow and Tony Shaloub.

This is according to this Associated Press report,

Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like [Don] Katz, they can now use them to listen to bedtime stories.

In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto their digital audio players.

"I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook," says Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb.

And those people should be shot. I don't know how kids' bodies develop, but they probably shouldn't be sleeping with earbuds stuck in their ears. I have an mp3 player and it has all these warnings about playing loud music for extended periods of time, and I'm pretty sure it says you shouldn't use them when you're sleeping. And these parents put the kid into bed, and say, "not too loud" without defining what "too loud" is, and then leave the kid alone for eight hours. Sure, you can set volume limits on an iPod, if you remember, or if you want your kid to hate you.

"In a way," Linn says, "this is another gadget for outsourcing parenting." [Susan Linn is the author of "The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in Our Commercialized World."]

That's right. We all know, this is just more crap for us to buy. Hell, you can go back to the 1960s and find some comedian telling the joke about listening to the vocabulary building self-improvement record when he goes to bed, but during the night, the record skips, and now he stutters. (Okay, the only example I could find is from Steven Wright, but I'm sure I heard Shecky Green tell it.) So today's kids aren't any more evolved to listen to loud sounds just because they explode from an iPod. When I was a kid, I had an 8-track tape player that opened up so that I could put one speaker next each ear, and I often went to sleep listening to Pink Floyd. And I had the freakiest dreams. Imagine what dreams the kid will have who listens to Anne of Green Gables as read by Gilbert Gottfried.

So I'm probably one of those people who will be deaf soon. I listen to music that's way too loud. One time I was at an indoor concert with the band My Bloody Valentine, and it got so loud that my vision cut out. I couldn't see at all, and I shuffled over to a wall and leaned there until it came back. I'd never heard something so loud before. It was only after that blackout that I noticed most of the other kids there were wearing earplugs. Pussies.

But parents shouldn't be sending their kids to bed with crap in their ears or with six-foot cables waiting to wrap around their necks and strangle them. And if you don't believe me, here are some helpful tips for not going deaf. Which I'll probably never listen to.

Note: Yes, I know that they don't need to use earbuds to listen, that they can dock the player in a base with speakers. But do you think I thought about that before I wrote this thing? No, I did not. And I for damn sure am not deleting this post just because of some lack of research on my part. Nope, I wrote it, so you're reading it. We can argue the facts some other time.