Every day, hours of streamed sound — from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to Dr. Dre to Arctic Monkeys — flow through dirty earbuds and into my scattered brain. The Swedish music service is nearly as important to me as red blood cells, especially when deadlines loom. However, I’ve come to realize Spotify doesn’t exist just to crank out pop songs and other traditional forms of music — it’s a mine of audiobook gems.
Several playlists floating throughout this eighth and 16th note galaxy boast obscure books, crackly poems from the 1920s, and a surprising mix of French and German audiobooks. The easiest way to access this archived library is under “browse” and then “genre & moods” category. Scroll down the tiles, past “Christian” and “Travel” until there, at the very bottom right tile, you find “Word,” a digital funhouse for bookish nerds. A few of the playlists have hilarious names like “A Hipster’s Guide to Poetry” or “Stories for Your Inner Child;” I half expect “Nietzsche’s Existential Crises” and “Sex Books for Basic Girls” to appear soon. To have the world of Audible hidden within the chic confines of Spotify (with student pricing)!
The sexy repartee of Darcy delivered straight to my ears? The transatlantic, resounding voice of Sylvia Plath reading her own multilayered poetry? An entire playlist of William Shakespeare’s sonnets is there to delight, along with biographies of classical composers and Anton Chekhov short stories (“A Tragic Actor,” anyone?) A few book listings were only excerpts or the abridged versions of the full novel, but you can find The Jungle Book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Call of the Wild, among others, in their full-length glory. I’m fast abandoning my playlists of The Beatles, Cage the Elephant, and The Notorious B.I.G. for the sinuous diction of 19th-century English authors and Shakespeare.
It’s not just audiobook publishers offering their wares to the Internet — voice actors listed as independent artists present narrated works, mostly poetry or short story collections. There’s also an extensive body of work narrated by the authors themselves. The rich tones of Sylvia Plath! The lulling drawl of T.S. Eliot reading The Wasteland, or “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” or Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (“With Cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to”).
(There’s one glaring oddity about Spotify books. Most of the audiobooks are classics the copyrights of which have expired (which is, obviously, what allows them to be published). However, a large number of current audiobooks are floating in the netherworld of Spotify — in German! Stephen King’s The Stand, Antoine Laurain’s The President’s Hat (originally published in French), Dan Brown’s Inferno…all are sketchily encoded in German and broken down into one-minute long segments.)
Audible is great — for passionate book lovers willing to slice $15 from their paycheck. ITunes was tailored for fancy pants, each song and audiobook sold separately (excluding Apple Music, which I won’t go into here). But Spotify? It’s the hot-button music player for students. Several of my friends do not read (*tear*), but with the smirking face of Shakespeare next to the tattoos of Adam Levine, they’re more likely to hear the bard out. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” with “Your sugar, Yes, please, Won’t you come and put it down on me” — what a beautiful mess of sine and cosine waves!
Here is a playlist, for your summer listening pleasure.
