I commute a lot these days. More than I used to. I commute at a time when everybody else is commuting. To get to my destination by 9 a.m. To leave my workplace around 5 p.m. It used to be just one paid highway with not much traffic, and then about 20 km down Yonge St. Wasn't so bad. Now it's Hwy 407, 404, 401, and then Yonge St., and then several subway stops. Doesn't matter that I'm being driven. Doesn't matter I don't have to be quite awake. Aggravation builds up, especially considering the Toronto subway part of my daily journey. Those several stops prove to be more and more demanding every day. There doesn't seem to be a good time before 9 a.m. to take the subway. Half of the inhabitants of the suburbs take the subway at exactly the same time, all of them irritated, sleepy, not quite aware of the movements of their coffee cups, with backpacks and coffee breaths in the unpleasant vicinity of me. There is no chance to get a seat, but there is often not even a chance to get a bar to hold on to. Thank the universe I'm tall - at least I have my own layer of air on the subway train that most of the riders don't get to breathe!
The lack of hand support, the necessity of holding on to my bag and paying attention, and the fact that I'm annoyed most of the time, created an interesting situation for me reading-wise. Out of desperation - and because I have to have my hands free to grab on to things when the subway stops suddenly in the middle of the tunnel - I started listening to books in the mp3 format. I've always been doing that but now is the first time when the where dictates the what. Confused? Let me explain.
I used to listen to the exact same kinds of books I would be reading in the traditional way. Literary novels. Impressive non-fiction. Books about books. Books that made me feel better about myself - just for reading them. Books whose titles looked impressive on my reading lists on this blog. Well, that time is over.
I feel like I'm climbing down the isle of reading respectability and soon I will listen to something by James Patterson (or not quite by him but with his holy name in big letters on the cover)!
Turns out, only a specific kind of book can be listened to on Toronto subway. Definitely plot-driven. Definitely non-literary. Preferably low-brow. Fast. Read by the author, if possible. Not too intellectual - or at least not too demanding. Not all the books I've listened to on the subway in the last 5 months were like that. But this is what I strive for these days. Sad.
The list of my to-date subway books on mp3 is as follows:- Harkness, Deborah. A Discovery of Witches (continuation of my vampire/witches obsession)
- Linsay, Jeff. Dexter Is Delicious (continuation of my obsession with premeditated blood spatter)
- Brown, Dan. The Lost Symbol (I know, I know, I shouldn't have, but actually, it was a great subway book! Fast-paced, with short chapters and the characters I was oh-so-familiar with!)
- Silverman, Sara. The Bedwetter (a stand-up comedy/biography book read by the author - quite hah-larious most of the time but very short. Didn't last me long but was quite perfect to get me "de-gravated" in the mornings before the first liter of coffee.)
- Sigler, Scott. Infected (a weird X-files-like sci-fi read unbelievably well by the author. Actually, performed, not read. There are sound effects and such - and he's changing voices! Great stuff, aside from some majorly disturbing descriptions of self-mutilation - which because of the format of the book was impossible to skip, like I would normally do if I were reading it. A lot of knife-poking, self-cutting alien bodies out of one's body and burning one's buttocks on the gas stove. What can I say. Great subway book.)
- Baldacci, David. Deliver Us From Evil (a very, very attractive bad guy who might just be too evil to extinguish... Almost Hannibal-Lecter-attractive. Nicely exaggerated Ukrainian war criminal and some quite well done personages trying to extinguish him as creatively as possible. Multiple wounds caused by guns, dogs, as well as a little gadget that allows the wielder to remove all of the unwitting participant's skin - one uninterrupted strip at a time.)
You see the pattern, don't you. It seems it has to be something that will deal with my morning aggression and keep me intrigued enough not to let the subway part of my commute get to me. It has to distract when I hear the announcements that start with "Attention all passengers on Yonge-University-Spadina line. We are currently experiencing...", at which point they become incomprehensible (usually the mumbled part has to do with longer than normal travel time between.. and ... due to: 1) a disabled train 2) signal problems 3) unauthorized presence on the track 4) smoke on the track level 5) passenger-activated alarm on a train. Sometimes they don't say what it is - and that means a very unauthorized and very sudden presence on the track level...Pat Barker's Life Class will not get heard on my commute. I started it hoping for some fast action with an artistic twist but I had to abandon it. I had trouble getting sufficiently distracted. Too literary. Too good. I'm hopeful though for The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker. It reminds me of Alice Hoffman's stuff, and Alice Munro's, and Wally Lamb's. I am intrigued and impressed - and I'm only on track 17 of 72! I'll stick to that one, despite its literariness...
