"Listen Instead of Read"

Sometimes a good book can be savored just as well through the ear as by the eye---particularly if the listener is in a car or truck driving for hundreds of miles on an interstate highway.

I know of a lady whose car ran out of gas on the Colorado prairie between Julesburg and Sterling while she was listening to a recorded book. She had become so engrossed with the story that she had forgotten to stop at North Platte to fill up her car’s gas tank!

When a highway patrolman stopped to offer her assistance, she had to confess that, while she was waiting for help, she had also run down the battery of her car listening to the rest of her romance novel. The patrolman was sympathetic. He told her that he listens to recorded books as he is patrolling the highways late at night. As they were riding in the patrol car to and from a gas station to get fuel for her car, the two exchanged lists of recorded books they had “read”.

I’ve never had my car run out of gas because I had become too involved in a recorded book, but I have had my wife come out to the garage and knock on the window of my car to ask me if there was a problem. I had driven into the garage 15 minutes earlier and, because the story I had been listening to was not quite finished, I had decided to sit in the car in the dark garage to finish the story
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While the Library has several thousand recorded books on audio tape, the collection is gradually shifting to full-length books on compact discs, or CDs. The major reasons for this format shift is that many of the new cars no longer have factory-installed audio tape players. Instead, the new cars are coming with CD players as standard equipment.

If your car has a CD player and you are contemplating a long drive or a series of shorter drives, you might want to visit the Library’s great collection of recorded books on CD.

The scope of the hundreds of CDs vary from the readings of the latest books such as the David Baldacci crime novel, “Total Control”, John Sanford’s “Mortal Prey” or Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” to classics like “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens, “Emma” by Jane Austen, “Down & Out In Paris & London” by George Orwell or “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Although the Library’s collection of recorded books—either audio tape or CD—are mostly novels, there are a number of great non-fiction works including David McCullough’s “John Adams” autobiography on 26 discs, Gore Vidal’s “Inventing a Nation”, Dominick Dunne’s “Justice: Crimes, Trials, and Punishments”, and “An Hour Before Daylight, Memories of a Rural Boyhood” by former President Jimmy Carter.

The Library’s complete listing of over 200 recorded books on CDs can be viewed on Internet by logging onto the Library’s website, www.columbuslibrary.info . From there, select “Catalog”. At the catalog, select “power search”, under “Library” select, “Columbus Public Library” and go to the field listed “Location”. Select “Recorded Book on Compact Disc” and hit “enter”.

We hope you will soon visit the Library and check out one or more recorded books on audio tape or CD. A word of caution however! Regularly check your fuel gauge as you travel down the highway listening to a Library’s recorded book. You don’t want to find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere with the car’s engine dead and the battery slowly dying because you can’t stop listening to a story.

Recent donations to the Columbus Library Foundation include a memorial from Mr. and Mrs. Richard Luebbe in honor of John Svoboda. Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Tooley presented a donation in memory of Erin Bettenhausen. Mr. and Mrs. Ray Welker and sons gave a memorial in honor of Carl Spidle, and Mr. and Mrs. Arden Saalfeld presented memorials in memory of William Campbell and Clarence Schmid.