The other night I finished listening to At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson.   This is an audiobook I got through Amazon’s Vine program.  It is a book I would almost certainly have bought myself at some point, although I would have bought the paper version.

It was an interesting experience for me since I have never listened to a book before.  Here is what I wrote, followed by a few thoughts on the whole paradigm of audiobooks which didn’t seem appropriate to put into an Amazon review.

I’m writing about the audiobook version of this book, which weighs in at sixteen-and-a-half hours spread over 14 CDs. This is actually the first audiobook I have read/listened to and I think I may have given the paper (or Kindle) version the full five stars.

Leaving aside my own preferences for written over spoken books, I’ll concentrate on the two main aspects of this: the content and the delivery. Comments on the content would apply equally to the other versions but comments on the delivery are unique to the audiobook.

If, like me, you already have several of Bryson’s earlier books on travel, language, science or autobiography you will know what to expect from this – lots and lots of interesting facts and stories that are loosely hung on a topic which in this case is the history of the home. This might sound like a narrow topic but it expands into stories of scientific discovery, architectural history, social history, medicine, agriculture, and more.

The whole thing is more engaging than most traditional history books because Bryson has given himself license to veer off at tangents and to effectively cherry-pick history, choosing the most interesting, amusing or mind-boggling nuggets from anywhere. This emphasis on breadth rather than depth makes it entertaining and often had me stopping and dipping into Wikipedia to look up places that are mentioned and see pictures of them, or to get a bit more detail.

A valid criticism of the book could be that it is shallow and concentrating on the sensational side of things, but that is also its strength because it makes it accessible to those of us who are not historians and may lead us to investigate some parts in greater depth elsewhere – in the same way that Brian Cox does for astronomy or Jim Al-Khalili does for physics.

Some of the facts and anecdotes may only have a tenuous relevence to the theme, and a lot of the content relates to the grand country houses and lives of the gentry rather than normal everyday homes and lives, but I can live with that.

The audiobook is read by the author and I would have expected that to be a good thing, but it didn’t work too well for me. Having done the research he must know a lot about the material included in the book and having chosen what to write about he must have included those things which most interested him. I would have thought this would result in a reading with a sense of infectious enthusiasm, but instead it was strangely flat.

Bill Bryson is a likeable chap with a soothing voice but I’m not sure that is what the book needed. It must be a bit of a chore to spent more than 16 hours reading aloud, but it was also a bit of a chore listening to it because of the flat delivery. One of Bryson’s little tropes is to include quite long lists of examples and they really did start to irritate me. In some places he even seemed to give the wrong emphasis on words more in the style of somebody reading a passage for the first time, and not what I would expect from somebody who wrote it.

As a practical matter, if you rip this to a computer to listen to it on there, or to transfer to an mp3 player, the naming of tracks is very unhelpful. Each disc is split into about 20 tracks of a few minutes each but they are just called “sang 1”, “sang 2” and so on, and there is no indication in the track names of where chapters start. At the end of the process you will have 16 tracks called “sang 1” for example. I spent a little time renaming the tracks and other information to make it easier to handle and to make sure I would not end up listening to things in the wrong order.

Overall, I enjoyed this, but I think it would work better as a normal book which can be dipped into, preferably with an index for reference purposes. I might even be tempted to buy the paperback at some point.

The first two paragraphs are there because Amazon does have the habit of putting reviews for all different formats together so you might be looking at the product page for the audiobook and see reviews of the hardback or Kindle versions.   It can get confusing for somebody thinking about buying the paperback and seeing somebody criticise the author’s accent or diction.

Cards on the table: I really didn’t get on with the whole concept of listening to a book.  I know a lot of people do play books on their car stereo or on their mp3 players to help pass long journeys, as I sometimes do with podcasts, and I was listening to this on a deskbound PC but even so it didn’t work for me.

Perhaps I would find it more suitable for a novel, especially something from the more action-oriented end of the market, but it doesn’t work too well with non-fiction.  If you realise that you didn’t catch the name of a person or place it is not as easy to skip back to it, or to linger on it more in the first place.  This was a problem becasue I was often swapping onto the internet to look up things like Scara Brae or Howard Castle to better visualise them.

I thought it would work better than that.  I was really expecting something more episodic, a bit like that history of the world in 100 objects series on the radio: 10-minute chapters rather than 45 to 60 minute chapters.  I thought it would be a bit like listening to a series of podcasts or radio documentaries but of course this was not written with that sort of delivery on mind and is not adapted at all – it is just the book read out aloud.

I’m not sure I could listen to this on a car stereo.  It requires a bit more concentration than I would want to spare while driving.  The monotone, deadpan delivery requiring even more concentration than if it had been read with some enthusiasm.

But I couldn’t listen to this on my mp3 player either.  I know that if I was listening on a train , plane,  bus or beach I would doze off after 15 minutes and would keep waking up and having to rewind back to the last bit I remembered.

I have no idea whether this is typical of the audiobook experience.  Maybe it is something I would enjoy and this is just not a suitable book to introduce me to the paradigm, but I suspect I am old-fashioned enough to prefer the paper version – or an electronic version of course.

Is it just me?  Anybody else out there have similar issues or do you all happily listen away?