Time to sing my praises for Audible.com again. What can I say -- sometimes I hit their site, see all the great titles they've added, and go into geek ecstasy. I guess that's just what happens when a company's hitting its stride (gee, when was the last time you felt that way about your friendly neighborhood government bureaucracy?).
After teasing me for months, Audible finally posted the unabridged version of Robert Jordan's The Dragon Reborn. It weighs in at 24 hours, 31 minutes long, which is about two weeks of commute time for me. Even cooler, Audible's already posted the next book in the series -- The Shadow Rising -- which is 40 freaking hours long. That's a whole month's worth of commute time. Actually, it's more than that since I now spend about half my time in the car listening to podcasts.
The Shadow Rising was a nice surprise. So was Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, which is a little over 20 hours long, and is a prequel of sorts to his novel Crpytonomicon. I have been struggling to read this book for the last two years or so, and it's a relief to know that I can just listen to the damn thing now. (I love Stephenson's work, but this book's just taking forever to get started. Like a friend said, it takes 300 or 400 pages for it to really get started).
What dropped my jaw though, was their recent additions of Objectivism-related books. They've had Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead up for years (and that's one of the reasons I joined Audible in the first place). But within the last week they've added two other tomes: For the New Intellectual, which is a collection of essays written by Ayn Rand, and Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff. The second book is based on a lecture course that Peikoff gave, and Audible quotes Rand as saying "Until or unless I write a comprehensive treatise on my philosophy, Dr. Peikoff's course is the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of objectivism; that is, the only one that I know of my own knowledge to be fully accurate."
It's been a while since I've delved into the depths of Objectivist thought, these books provide an excellent excuse to do so ... just as soon as I get past Jordan's pesky dragons and Stephenson's cryptic mathematicians.