I do a lot of commuting by car, which leaves me with a lot of time to fill. To help fill it, I have an account at audible.com, and listen to a lot of audiobooks.The one I'm working on right now is G.J. Meyer's A World Undone, a single-volume popular history of the Great War (1914-1918). The interesting thing about this book, apart from the fact that it's about the Great War and that interests me in itself, is that it's read by Robin Sachs, an English voice actor who has also appeared as one of my favorite video game characters. This in itself is enough to amuse me on some level throughout the listening, because I am five, but the other day I reached a bit of the book that made it ten times better.
See, A World Undone is on the whole a pretty straightforward "what happened where, when" sort of narrative history of the war, but it has sidebars into various bits of background and color. One of those sidebars is about the shift in tone of literature that happened on both sides during the war, from the jingoistic drivel of 1914 to the searing, spare, and frank assessments of the war's horrors that came later. Among others, Meyer mentions Henri Barbusse, author of Under Fire, a book I did a report on for my military history class last year and enjoyed very much... and then, at the very end of the segment, he gets to Wilfred Owen, the greatest (IMO) of the British trench poets.
And includes in its entirety my favorite of Owen's poems.
So now, in essence, I possess a recording of Zaeed Massani - battle-scarred 23rd-century mercenary and general galactic badass from the Mass Effect games - reading "Dulce et Decorum Est".
I find this, as you might expect, beyond awesome.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.