playaways

Yesterday I researched all the playaways in the Sacramento library system--there are more than 500 of them, and I looked through each title to find ones that strike my fancy. A playaway is like a MP3 player but it's loaded with a single book. That's how I listened to Persuasion a month ago. I'm thinking of what I'd like to bring to listen to on the trip because I don't think I can read in the car--car sickness.

Anyway, I found tons I'm interested in. I ordered for now A Country Year by Sue Hubbell which is six hours, and something called Rapid Spanish which is only an hour. For the trip I think I'll try to get Madame Bovary and/or Reading Lolita in Tehran. Those are 11 and a half and 18 and a half hours respectively, which doesn't make much sense--maybe Madame Bovary is abridged, which would suck. Anyway, those two appeal to me most. A lot of the books had interesting titles or were by an author I'd heard of, so I ended up looking at synopses on amazon, and I learned some stuff. For example, I'm really interested in reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, but I would want to read it on paper.