Kestrell

My favorite arrative medium, by far, is text, using text-to-speech, which my brain basically internalizes as my inner reading voice. However, I also love theatre (shakespeare, Tom Stoppard) and the human voice (radio programs, readings, and recordings), especially people who have a sense of music and, even when not singing, are just amazing story tellers. I love blues and jazz musicians almost as much as books, because they can tell stories about anything. New Orleans musicians in particular are just amazing storytellers--it's a culture where talking to other people, be it related to the music, oral history, or just shooting the shit--is still important. I also love movies, mostly classic ones, because it seems to me that during the period of the 1930s and 1940s, when a lot of writers had made the transition from radio to film, the dialogue was sharper and wittier, because the writers had been writing for a medium which had toconvey action without the use of pictures to show what was happening. Try a film such as "Out of the Past"--like Shakespeare and Stoppard, the actions and expessions for the actors are indicated in the text. I like some audiobooks, usually more for the narrator or because the use of a narrator complements the story--I actually prefer Anne Rice novels and the Harry Dresden stories in audiobook format. I used to read a lot of audiobooks narrated by Tim Curry, who has done a lot of Anne Rice and Umberto Eco audiobooks, and James Marters (Spike from "Buffy") does the Harry Dresden audiobooks. I think the element I really prize in radio, audiobooks, and music recordings, is a sense of liveness. Most audiobooks have to be so scripted that the human voice tends, in my mind, to lose this sense of liveness and spontaneity, so I lose interest. I also don't like the fact that a human narrator imposes his or her own sense of the story, but for action-based stories, such as the fantasy-noir of Harry Dresden, there isn't a lot of ways to read the text other than the straight way the human narrator is reading it.