Easy Listening (and the Timeless Sherlock Holmes)

Don't know what happened, but my voracious appetite for reading as a teenager has waned dramatically over the past two decades.  Maybe staring at a computer screen for work has made my eyes too tired to read "for fun" during off hours; or perhaps it's just plain laziness.  Regardless of the excuse, I've shifted my "reading" time to audiobooks in recent years and am finding this alternative quite riveting.

It all started when my guy gave me the Harry Potter audio series, read -- or I should say, performed -- by the amazing Jim Dale.  "Amazing" because Mr. Dale created and animated the voices of every character in the books so convincingly that, when I finally watched the movies, I used his voice on the recordings as a metric for the various actors' performances.  Since Harry Potter, I've mainly sought out books that are also available as recordings.

A recent random search for audiobook apps for my phone introduced me to Librivox, an online collection of books in the public domain (i.e., no longer under copyright).  The books are read by volunteers, some livelier than others, and all are available for free.

I jumped at the chance to catch up on "classics," including the original series that I'm currently enjoying, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which inspired over a dozen TV shows and a movie franchise.  Thanks to TBOL3, Kara Shallenberg, and Robin Cotter -- readers of the first three Holmes-Watson adventures that I've consumed so far -- for filling my head with images of clever criminal antics, the tantalizing Irene Adler, and the gritty London scene of the 1890s.  A wonderful companion to the contemporary BBC series, Sherlock, that has captivated our household recently.

I wonder where this acoustic adventure will take me next...

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Photo credit: Google images