Network Effect, by Martha Wells (audiobook)

 After a little over a week, I've finished listening to Network Effect by Martha Wells, the first Murderbot Diaries novel and kinda-sorta-fifth installment in the series. (The short story is 4.5 in the series, I guess. There's another novella, "Fugitive Telemetry", that was released after Network Effect but set before it, so I don't know which ought to be 5th and which 6th.)

In some respects, the audiobook format was a wild success. It was a great activity to do alongside other activities. I listened to it while driving, fixing breakfast, feeding the cat, drawing Apothecaria, and exercising. "I can listen to more Murderbot" was a big motivator for continuing to exercise daily after Eliyahu left last Sunday: I've walked for an hour or so every day for the last seven since they left. I enjoyed the story and was interested to hear the rest. Sometimes the narrator's delivery of lines cracked me up. The cast is huge and the voice actor tried to give each character, and some of the female characters had 'voices' that were grating, which I did not love. On the other hand, the most annoying voice was reserved for one particular character who absolutely deserved to have the most annoying voice, and that cracked me up. (Since Murderbot is the first-person narrator throughout most of the diaries, it's easy to imagine the voice actor as 'doing Murderbot's impression of this character'. And character with annoying voice telling Murderbot, "I do not sound anything like that." while Murderbot says, "You sound exactly like that.")

But I never sat down to listen to the audiobook without doing anything else. I didn't listen to the book before falling asleep at night (instead, I read comics or my own stories). The format made me restless. I could listen to it in situations where it was awkward or impossible to read an ebook. But I wouldn't listen to it in situations where an ebook would be convenient. Even when the action rose as the book neared the climax, I never listened to "just fifteen more minutes" after I finished exercise or whatever other activity I was doing alongside it, much less listen through to the end. This is unlike the last two novellas, where after a certain point I just read through to the end instead of for however long I'd planned to read for. (I also read the first two novellas in one sitting each, but as that was during a plane trip, it's pretty much a given.) 

I listened at 1x speed, and it's possible that listening at a faster pace would've been more engaging. But I was relying heavily on cues in the narrator's voice to tell who was speaking, and I didn't want to make that harder. Even so, it was often hard for me to tell who was speaking, or how they were speaking (The Murderbot Diaries have frequent 'feed' conversations, which I picture as 'instant messaging but you think it instead of typing') or, in the case of Murderbot, if it was saying something or just thinking it. Sometimes I'd miss some context and not realized I'd missed it. Going back more than a few minutes was so awkward I never tried it, so when that happened I was just like "well, I hope it's not important" and would go on. I hadn't had these issues with the ebooks. Sometimes I just wanted to check something, like 'is the character named now the same as an earlier one? I think so?' and with an ebook I'd've paged back but I wasn't gonna try listening back. "You can alternate between reading the ebook and listening to it", with the option to look at the text I was hearing, would've made for a significantly better experience for me.

But all this said: it worked well enough, and the exercise motivation is great. I haven't started listening to "Fugitive Telemetry" yet, but I've checked it out from Hoopla. When I run out of Murderbot Diaries, I'll try some other audiobooks. I expect to run out of audiobooks I want to hear and that are available from a provider I'm willing to use (everything I have heard about Audible.com from the publishing side makes me hate it and I'm not using it as a consumer). So I'm likely to give up on the format again once I try listing to a few audiobooks that don't work for me. But we'll see.

Every now and then on social media the question of "does listening to audiobooks count as reading" comes up. I am not sure what the point of this question is. Listening to audiobooks always struck me as "reading on hard mode". Unless you listen at high playback speeds, it takes longer (and listening at high speeds does not make comprehending it easier). It's harder to go back to refresh your memory on  details you missed. It's easier to miss details if your attention wanders. Etc. For me, it was a different experience from reading an ebook, but I don't feel like I need to read the ebook as well. I got about as much out of listening as I would've from reading.