I finished listening to the audiobook version of Born Standing Up (which is the version I recommend since Steve Martin narrates the book himself and does a great job), and then I listened to it a second time because I sort of became addicted to listening to him talk. Then I listened to the audiobook version of his last fiction novel, The Pleasure Of My Company, which he also narrates and which is also very good. It’s about a guy with slight autistic and not-as-slight obsessive compulsive tendencies. A lot of the humor comes from his pathetic lonely existence, which I appreciated but some people might find just plain pathetic.
I made my way about halfway through Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, it’s the “original scroll” version which apparently features more realistic language than the version that was published in the 1950′s. And it does manage to feel pretty modern, but it’s just too rambling and uneventful to keep me interested. I can see how it inspired writers of a previous generation, Hunter S. Thompson’s stuff is very reminiscent of it, but in 2008 it’s irrelevant. It’s kind of like how even the greatest old movies are somewhat boring, because I was raised on new movies that already knew all those tricks the old films invented.
Oh and while all this was going on in the background I managed to reach level 24 in WoW, woo.
2 Comments
Fuck, you failed to mention that there was an audiobook in your last post… I already ordered the book. I’ll still hang on to it because it was only like $10, but yeah I’ll definitely listen to the audiobook instead because that’s way more convenient to me. I’ll look into downloading The Pleasure Of My Company too.
I picked up Born Standing Up a couple of months ago and still haven’t gotten around to reading it. Sounds like the audiobook version might be the way to go.