Audiobooks and Long Man

I don’t often listen to audiobooks although it’s not because I don’t like them. I do. It’s just that I’m either not in one place long enough (I don’t have a long commute), or I don’t have a system worked out of listening to the endless hours behind them. There are remnants of audiobooks I’ve started (five discs in, five more to go) that I have not finished over the years. Perhaps I could remedy this by listening more to audiobooks on my iPod while gardening and dog walking.

I find audios enjoyable but also different for me than reading books. I either experience them differently, or focus differently, or use different muscles :-). Sometimes I worry I’ll miss small details if they’re spoken and not in print, or else I’ll lose my place when I put an audio aside. For various reasons I guess I much prefer reading over audios but every once in a while I’ll treat myself to listening to a production of a good narrator breathing life into a novel. What are your thoughts on audiobooks? Do you find them as effective as reading books? When do find the time to listen to them? And do they count in your book totals?

Last week I (finally) finished the audio of Amy Greene’s 2014 novel “Long Man,” which we had started in June while driving to Glacier Park in Montana. It consisted of just 9 CD discs but somehow those seemed to last a lifetime. Still I was transfixed at times to the story and actress Dale Dickey’s voice who told it. She was the perfect narrator with her Tennessee accent where the story is set and by giving all the characters such an emotional authenticity.

The novel takes place over a few days in 1936 as the government plans to dam the Long Man River in East Tennessee and flood a small Appalachian town to bring electricity and jobs to the region. Just a few holdouts remain, notably Annie Clyde Dodson, who wants to keep her family’s mountaintop farm and is protesting the power company from driving her out. But as the deadline looms for her to leave, a storm rages and her three-year-old daughter, Gracie, goes missing.

Did Gracie drown amid the rising river, or did Amos, a drifter who’s returned home to wreak havoc on the government’s plans, take her? You won’t know till the very end. But meanwhile the book is quite a bit more than just the one storyline. It’s very descriptive and goes into the whole Appalachian town and community and what’s happened to it during Depression times.

There’s various characters, too, that the story gets into the heads of, namely Annie Clyde, and her husband James Dodson, her aunt Silva, Amos the drifter, and the woman who raised him, the town’s sheriff, and the man from the power company. It takes a little while to keep them all straight, but including them all infuses the story with a fuller picture of it from various angles. Just a few times I wanted to clobber the ever-stubborn and at times crazy Annie Clyde for not getting out and saving her family before the flood. Though she doesn’t seem to listen.

Still I’m quite amazed by author Amy Greene’s gift for storytelling and writing in “Long Man.” The amount of detail she uses in itself is luminous. I haven’t read her first novel “Bloodroot,” which was highly praised as well, but I’m thinking I need to. Surely no one paints a more thorough picture of East Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains and its characters than Amy Greene does in her books. She’s from there, and packs a wallop in everything she describes. I thought the suspense in “Long Man” was pretty good too, though at times all I wanted was the story to get back to finding out where the child went. Did the river swallow her or not? I listened long and hard to the audio to find out and was rewarded with an interesting and fulfilling ending. Now I will eagerly await whatever book Amy Greene does next.

What about you have you read either of Amy Greene’s books, and if so what did you think? Or what are your thoughts about audiobooks?