The Cracked Bassoon

Audiobooks-o-rama

Filed under audiobooks, jekyll, liquid, python.

I love fiction, but I’m a very slow reader. I’m 35 now, and I’ve read about 50 books in my life, which is pretty terrible. If I’d read the same number of books per year as the average person (which is 12, apparently), I should be well past 200 by now. My wife—a prolific reader herself with a blog on the topic—suggested I try audiobooks. I discovered Libby in March 2019, and it completely transformed how I consume literature. Now, just over a year and around 100 audiobooks later, I decided to compile some thoughts on the topic and review everything I’ve listened to so far. This post goes covers how I acquire audiobooks, what I like, and provides geeky details of how I compiled a database of my reviews. If you don’t care about any of this and just want some recommendations, I suggest jumping to my next post, which lists my favorites.

Where I get them

About 90% of my audiobooks come from Libby. Libby is a free mobile app from Overdrive that connects to many local libraries across the USA. If you’re a member of one or more of these libraries (see here for a list), you can use it will deliver loans straight to your e-reader or phone for free. Given that audiobooks can be pretty expensive, Libby may save you a small fortune.

The Libby icon. From their website.

As a resident of Massachusetts, I’m eligible for membership of all libraries in my state. Individual town libraries are typically syndicated into larger networks, allowing them to offer larger catalogs, but even these networks tend have fairly limited audiobook offerings. Initially I signed up to several small-town networks, but found that many of the audiobooks I wanted either had few copies, leading to long hold times (more on holds shortly), or no copies at all. Luckily for me, Boston Public Library is huge, and I can get most of what I’m after from there.

If you live outside the USA or in an area without a library in the Overdrive network, you can sign up for membership of several big US libraries online for an annual fee. Here is a useful article. I signed up for the Brooklyn Public Library. Membership costs $50 a year for a non-resident and is absolutely worth the money.

If—and only if—a particular book isn’t available through Libby, I use Audible. Audible’s subscription service is quite expensive, but it’s pretty good. As a member, you get one or two credits per month, plus access to sales and special offers. I recommend signing up to their newsletters so that you don’t miss offers. When I first signed up, there was a sale on fantasy novels; I picked up a ton of them for considerably less than the cost of credits. Audible’s no-questions-asked return policy is a big plus. Also, since my wife is part of my Amazon Household, I’m able to take advantage of Whispersync to get books she’s already read and recommends at a reduced price.

There are numerous other paid audiobook services. I haven’t tried any others yet because I haven’t encountered any instances where an audiobook was only available or much cheaper elsewhere. Some of these other services are more supportive of independent booksellers and I suppose I should use them instead of an Amazon company. If anyone has recommendations, feel free to leave a comment at the end of this post.

When I request and borrow

The major limitation of borrowing audiobooks is that you generally can’t listen to what you want when you want. There’s just no way around the fact that hold times for popular books tend to be long. One of the first books I tried to borrow was The Blind Assassin and I’m still on hold, over a year later!

Using Libby requires a bit of planning and a lot of patience. Becoming a member of multiple libraries helps a lot (see above). I tend to spam holds, placing them on everything I’m even vaguely interested in, until I’m maxed out. I request the same book at multiple libraries.

But I also try to be nice to other borrowers. When a book is ready to be borrowed, I decide whether I really want it, and whether I can realistically finish it, before borrowing. I never have more than one copy of a book at a time, returning the copy with the shorter shelf time. I’m aggressive in returning books I’m not enjoying. (What’s the point of powering through when I could be listening to something better? And if I change my mind, I’ll just request it again some other time.) I return a book as soon as I’m done, obviously.

Listening speed

There’s no way I could listen to so many audiobooks at their natural speed. I usually listen to somewhere between 2.5 and 3 times speed, depending on the narrator and writing. If find myself ramping up gradually throughout a performance, especially if I’m listening to books from the same series back-to-back, since these usually have the same narrator(s).

My friends and family are incredulous about this and insist I must be constantly missing plot details and nuances in the performances. They could be right—all I can say in my defense is that I’m enjoying them regardless.

I get through books pretty quickly. I listen any time I’m doing something repetitious and nonverbal, such as walking the dog, laundry, and the daily commute—that is, when I had a daily commute in the pre-COVID-19 world. I’m able to finish a novella in a day, which puts me roughly on par with my wife’s book-reading.

What I like

I really like grim, macabre, surreal stuff. My favorite things to read, watch, and listen to are those that go right up to the edge of being enjoyable. This goes for all art forms.

I’m a man in his late thirties with a background in science, so yes, I listen to a lot of sci fi and fantasy. I like all the magic and monsters and stuff. However, I am very aware of the rampant misogyny that plagues both of these genres, and understand that this is a big turn-off for many readers/listeners. It is a problem for me too, and I give extra credit to books that manage to avoid sexist tropes and one-dimensional female characters.

I could care less about military fiction, true crime, romance, or young adult. I’m game for most other genres. I listen to male and female writers fairly equally.

I haven’t tried any non-fiction yet.

My reviews

I’ve reviewed every audiobook I’ve listened to since March 2019. I have given each book and performance a rating independently, both out of 10. I take the mean to get an overall score.

I’m neither a critic nor a particularly good writer, and there are few things in the world that interest me less than some amateur’s prolix opinions about art on the internet. So I try to keep my reviews sparse and direct. This is especially true of my performance reviews: since one narrator will read many books with little appreciable variation in quality, there isn’t always much to say.

The geeky bit

I’m a quantitative scientist, so naturally I turned my audiobook reviews into a coding side-project. This website is built using Jekyll, which is capable of processing data stored in YAML via Liquid. Each time I finish an audiobook, I add my review to a data file called audiobooks.yaml. A typical entry looks like this:

- audible_url: https://www.audible.com/pd/My-Year-of-Rest-and-Relaxation-Audiobook/B07BB2QD6Y?ref=a_author_Ot_c19_lProduct_1_2&pf_rd_p=1ae0e65e-ad09-4aa7-aa73-772cefb1b5e1&pf_rd_r=M5K9C1703TKWAZSZA5FG
book: 8
book_review:
  A bit lighter than Moshfegh’s previous works in the sense that nobody gets killed this time, but still pretty
  horrible. It is a testament to the quality of the writing that I was thoroughly entertained by the idea of
  self-obsessed New York hipster spending a year in bed. I found the descriptions of the artwork hilarious.
goodreads_id: "44279110"
performance: 8
performance_review:
  Great.

Notice that I only include information that I cannot get programmatically from other sources, such as my scores and reviews. I use Python to read in the manual YAML data as a dictionary, update it, then re-save within audiobooks.yaml.

As the name suggests, audible_url stores the URL to the audiobook’s Audible page. It turns out that Audible stores lots of audiobook details, such as the title, author, narrator(s), and duration, within a bit of JSON at the top of every page. I use the third-party package Beautiful Soup to scrape this data:

def audible(url):
    """Add book details from Audible.com webpage.

    """
    html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, features="html.parser")
    jsn = soup.find_all("script", type="application/ld+json")[1]
    data = json.loads(jsn.contents[0])[0]
    m = data["duration"].lstrip("PT").split("H")[1].split("M")[0]
    dic = {
        "audible_popularity": int(data["aggregateRating"]["ratingCount"]),
        "audible_score": float(data["aggregateRating"]["ratingValue"]),
        "year": int(data["datePublished"].split("-")[0]),
        "month": int(data["datePublished"].split("-")[1]),
        "day": int(data["datePublished"].split("-")[2]),
        "hours": int(data["duration"].lstrip("PT").split("H")[0]),
        "minutes": int(m) if m else 0,
        "image": data["image"],
        "title": data["name"].replace("'", "’"),
        "authors": [a["name"] for a in data["author"]],
        "narrators": [r["name"] for r in data["readBy"]],
    }
    return dic

I also use goodreads_id to grab a bit more data via the Goodreads API Client. You will need your own API key to use the function below yourself.

def goodreads(grid, key):
    """Add book details from Goodreads API.

    """
    client = goodreads_api_client.Client(developer_key=key)
    result = client.Book.show(grid)
    dic = {}

    if result["series_works"]:

        series = result["series_works"]["series_work"]
        series = [series] if not isinstance(series, list) else series
        dic["series"] = [s["series"]["title"].replace("'", "’") for s in series]
        dic["position_in_series"] = [s["user_position"] for s in series]

    dic["goodreads_score"] = float(result["average_rating"])
    dic["goodreads_popularity"] = int(result["ratings_count"])
    return dic

Finally, I clean up the data with some hard-coded edits. To display an audiobook’s information on a page, I added an HTML template with Liquid tags called audiobooks.html to my _includes directory, which looks something like this:

<p class="audiobooks">
<img src="{{ book.image }}" width="40%" />
<h3><i>{{ book.title }}</i> by {{ book.authors }}</h3>
<ul>
    {% if book.series %}
        <li>
            {% if book.series.size == 1 %}
                <b>Series</b>: {{ book.series }} (part {{ book.position_in_series }})
            {% else %}
                <b>Series</b>:
                <ul>
                    {% assign n = book.series.size | minus: 1 %}
                    {% for i in (0..n) %}
                        <li>
                            {% if book.position_in_series[i] %}
                                {{ book.series[i] }} (part {{ book.position_in_series[i] }})
                            {% else %}
                                {{ book.series[i] }}
                            {% endif %}
                        </li>
                    {% endfor %}
                </ul>
            {% endif %}
        </li>
    {% endif %}
    <li>
        {% if book.narrators.size == 1 %}
            <b>Narrator</b>: {{ book.narrators }}
        {% else %}
            <b>Narrators</b>:
            <ul>
                {% for narrator in book.narrators %}
                    <li>
                        {{ narrator }}
                    </li>
                {% endfor %}
            </ul>
        {% endif %}
    </li>
    <li>
        <b>Running time</b>: {{ book.hours }}h {{ book.minutes }}m
    </li>
    <li>
        <b>Abridgement or dramatization</b>:
        {% if book.abridged %}
            Yes.
        {% else %}
            No.
        {% endif %}
    </li>
    <li>
        <b>Book review</b>: {{ book.book_review }} <b>{{ book.book }}/10.</b>
    </li>
    <li>
        <b>Performance review</b>: {{ book.performance_review }} <b>{{ book.performance }}/10.</b>
    </li>
</ul>
<hr>

Using this schema, I can create numerous kinds of dynamically updated statistics and lists. For example, so far I’ve listened to 109 audiobooks. That number was generated using the following snippet:

{% assign counter=0 %}
{% for audiobook in site.data.audiobooks %}
  {% assign counter=counter | plus:1 %}
{% endfor %}

I will probably add to and modify this method as my ideas about how to present my reviews develop over time. For now, feel free to peruse my favorite audiobooks, least favorite audiobooks, or just a list of everything I’ve reviewed so far.

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