A civilising text
One of the problems with listening to audio books is that it’s not so easy to quote them in your blog.
Currently I am listening to The Black Company by Glen Cook. It has some fine sentences in it. The words are very well chosen. The vocabulary is advanced yet unostentatious. Mr Cook eschews ornamentation. He prefers to be visual, visceral and direct.
In this it serves my purpose well. I don’t read for idle entertainment but to stimulate my imagination and keep my literary senses sharp. I have a fear of shrinking into inarticulate taciturnity.
This was a theme in The Virginian, which I finished last week. That was also an audio book, though I must admit I also downloaded it as an ebook on Stanza. It was quite helpful to have the text to refer to. I re-read the first quarter of the book because I was a little confused after the first listen. My mind had wandered at some of the crucial moments and I missed some pivotal interactions.
I also wanted to quote from The Virginian but, even though I had the ebook, I couldn’t find the sentences that struck me as memorable. And now I have forgotten them completely.
But I do remember that Molly helped draw out The Virginian’s true character by encouraging him to read Shakespeare and Jane Austen, much as Cathy helped tame and civilise Hareton in Wuthering Heights.
So now The Black Company is civilising me.
