Authors@Google
I’ve run across several wonderful videos at YouTube from the Authors@Google series. Apparently, Google hosts author visits on a regular basis. These visits are recorded and available online. Each one is about 45 to 60 minutes long, including a reading followed by a question-and-answer period.
I especially love the one above, with author Paul Auster. I don’t adore his writing, but I do find it compelling. I’m as much a skeptic as a fan. But there is something nearly irresistible about the man’s spoken voice that sells a story I might otherwise abandon.
I discovered Auster’s spoken voice through Audible when I used my monthly selection to purchase The Book of Illusions. I listened to the book before I read it, and so Auster’s spoken voice is inextricably entwined with my reading of the book. I didn’t love the book, but I admired it; the intellectual challenges there are deft and heartbreaking.
The book he reads from in this video, Man in the Dark, has a similar tone–introspective, a journey of the mind, but grounded in the visceral. He gives an extended reading here that tempts me to pick up the book.
One of the common elements linking the two books is film. Auster seems incredibly knowledgable about film, and strangely, though I’m not at all knowledgable about it, I find his descriptions and analyses fascinating. As is his ongoing conversation with himself (and, via his narrators, his audience) about the similarities and differences between film and literature.