This is the reference desk. I answer questions here and I have answered this particular set of questions enough times that writing them down was overdue. The answers are short because the questions have short answers, whatever anyone tells you.
Your public library. A library card gets you a lending app on your phone, and the app has audiobooks in it, and they cost nothing and expire on their own so you never have to remember to return anything. If a title has a wait, place the hold and forget about it. It will arrive in six weeks like a letter you did not know you sent. Anything published before 1930 or so is also freely readable and freely recorded by volunteers, and some of those volunteers are extraordinary.
Whatever speed lets you hear the sentences. Most people land between 1.2 and 1.5. Faster than that and you are no longer listening to a book, you are auditing one. Nonfiction tolerates speed. Fiction does not, because rhythm is half of what a novel is doing and you cannot hear rhythm at 2x any more than you can taste soup by running past it.
Yes. Next question.
Set the sleep timer to twenty minutes and stop treating it as a failure. Falling asleep to a voice is one of the oldest good things available to a person. Rewind in the morning to the last part you remember and accept that you will re-hear the same four minutes for the rest of your life.
The ones you already noticed. That is not a dodge. Narration works when you stop hearing it, so the name you remember is the name that earned remembering. Write it down. Follow the narrator the way you would follow an author.
We have four hundred and eleven cassettes and a machine to play them on. I want to be honest with you about this before you come any further down the hall.
They are in the east cabinet. Doug bought them in 1997 from a man who was closing a rental counter and needed the shelving more than the stock. They are alphabetical by narrator, which is not how anyone looks for anything, and I have never reorganized them because Doug did it himself over one weekend and I could hear him being happy about it through the floor. The player is a dual deck. One side has worked since I arrived. The other side has not, and I have made my peace with that, and so has the deck.
You are welcome to sit with them. There is a chair.
No. You listen here. This has not been a problem for twenty-nine years and I am not going to describe it as one now.
I would like to know as well.
Something has changed and I cannot account for it. Until about a year ago I fielded perhaps two questions a week at this desk, and one of them was always the hours. Now there is a steady arrival of people who come in already looking past me, holding a phone at chest height, and ask where their library is. Not the library. Theirs. As though they left one here.
They ask whether their listening carried over. They ask if the app is down. A woman last Thursday asked me, kindly, whether I could just resend the link, and I said I did not have a link, and she said that was fine and could I check, and I checked, and I did not have a link. She was very gracious. She left a mug ring on the desk that is still there, and I have decided to keep it.
No. I have asked directly, twice, and both times the answer was a place name said with total confidence and a slight rising tone at the end, the way you say something you assume the other person already knows. I do not already know. Randy says he knows. Randy has been asked and did not elaborate, and Randy has never forgotten a name in his life, so I have stopped asking.
Marigold, which is to say myself, has not blinked since the Clinton administration. I mention this only because people occasionally raise it, and because it means I have seen every single one of these visitors arrive and every single one of them leave, and I can tell you that eleven of them did not leave. They sat down with the east cabinet. One of them is on cassette two hundred and six. She comes Tuesdays.
There is me. I know where everything is and I will tell you if you ask, and I would rather you asked than wandered, though wandering is permitted and has produced better results than asking in at least a dozen documented cases. If you want the general version of how finding things works around here, that is covered in how to search Booktrovert, and if you want to know what happens to the objects people leave behind, and they leave a great deal behind, see the lost and found.
One thing, and it is the only part of this page I will raise my voice about, which at this desk means saying it at exactly the same volume as everything else.
Buy a book. A physical one, from a person, for money. Whoever wrote the thing you listened to on your commute is a fragile organism who checked a sales number this morning and felt something about it, and the audio version and the paper version and the borrowed version all matter, but the bought one matters in a way the author can eat. I have watched writers come through this room for three decades. They are not durable. Be kind to them the practical way.
The desk closes at five. It does not, but I say that so people will eventually go home.
Unblinkingly,
Booktrovert #502