Audio Books While Running

Seriously, there is a joy, a joy to running I had not beheld. It is when you are reading and running at the same time, how, how?! Spotify has free audio books, it is glorious. If it is a sufficiently entertaining story, it carries you away, it frees you from the feeble entrapment of your limbs and lungs and allows a strangely enchanting flight through the hills of Wellington southern suburbs, enjoying a sort of glorious exploration of another world in a way lying and appreciating a book seems to miss.

Since I started this new method, I read three, they are all older classics of the most typical kind.

1. Wuthering Heights

To my great shame, I had not imbibed this, most canon of English masterpieces. We enjoy a vision of darkness in the late Georgian period, where the simplicity of relationships often expressed in such novels is exchanged for a violent brutality, where unstable personalities are thrown together with vicious and unhappy results. There is an edge to the gothic to it, with ghostly recognition, and a critique of the extremes of emotions, yet a beauty to the work. Holly Golightly criticises the protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffanies for his failure to achieve the heights of Wuthering Heights, and Kate Bush expresses a similar ode in her wonderful, elfin masterpiece, yet as a complete novel it struggles to achieve any real consequence, what lesson is learned other than to avoid heavy subscription to the very idea of a true and sustaining love.

2. Moby Dick

Yet, venturing through a few truly wonderful Thomas Hardy short stories as I washed the windows of my many windowed apartment, it was the next which mostly disappointed. It is a classic I had meant to read for some time, mainly for the similarities with the true classic, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. In that, most celebrated of Star Trek voyages, the crew of the infamous botany bay, resurrected. There is a certain magic to the tail of the "monomania" of Ahab, his fascination and (spoiler alert) fatal obsession with a whale, and you get caught up a bit, but maybe it is years of ethical sensibilities, but this whole respect teamed with willingness to viciously slaughter in the most painful manner possible, feels wrong, even if very in line with the brutality of nature. For those unacquainted, the book is basically a "how to whale", that has one whale who resists being murdered and occasionally strikes back and you know, slightly hurts a few of the whalers. It is all just a bit silly, the best parts are those that get into the relationship between the protagonist and his strange "native" "New Zealand" Queequeg, who has shrunken heads and is a pretty fine harpoonist, but they ("Ishmael") and him exchange some pretty hot and heavy nights in various beds, but then at the end he just disappears and I got very frustrated that the focus is on this stupid quest of a fairly intelligent whale who is already injured and yet people still try and kill him. Fuck Ahab is all I have to say.

3. Northhanger Abbey

But talking about being absorbed into a story and being emotionally invested. Northhanger abbey is seriously, gripping stuff. Not Wuthering Heights, nor Moby Dick, nor even the sweet Hardy short story caught me in the same way as Austen has. She laments at the start about the lack of takeup of her novel, and yet soon you are drawn into a world of fear, the endless, eternal, lazy fear at the heart of the young lady that she may not secure someone appropriate and who can make her happy, and in such a facile life pursuit that you may scoff and deem unworthy of serious attention, you cannot help but be engulfed, realising perhaps this is the only real question that is worth answering.

And that is drunk Poms, signing out.

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