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i'm bookless at the moment and have a craving for some literary stimulation. often you can exchange books in hostels, but i've struggled of late to find any in the english language. it's situations such as this where a kindle or ipad would come in handy. my other alternative is audiobooks, so last week i downloaded high fidelity by nick hornby. it's a book that i've read and enjoyed before, but that was over ten years ago so i couldn't really recall the details. unfortunately i never got that far as upon pressing play i discovered the narrator - nigel carrington - was wholly inappropriate for the role. his voice did not match the voice i had in my head when i first read the text. worse than that, he actively irritated me and made me hate the main character. it was a posh, upper-class voice which made every sentence sound both pompous and dismissive. and a little creepy. i really hope that this was due to the way the words were spoken as opposed to the words themselves - but out of respect for both the author, and my sanity, i had to turn it off. my conclusion from this brief and far from exhaustive experience is that audiobooks work best when read by the author themselves. and to that end i highly recommend i partridge: we need to talk about alan, orated magnificently by alan gordon partridge.

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