I've been going through his audiobooks, and in nearly every one there is like a 5 minute solid chunk of a character going down a list, or reading strings of numbers. I probably wouldn't have noticed it except for the fact in audio it goes on forever and you can't help but to notice it.
I think in both Jurassic Park books there are very long passages reciting how many of each dinosaur there are on the islands.
In Sphere they are reading a list of numbers off of the computer for like 5 minutes straight.
In Airframe they go down a huge list of airplane parts.
In Andromeda Strain there's a huge timestamped conversation between the shuttle and ground control.
This probably isn't worth a thread, but I just found it kinda funny that when I got to AS I was already waiting for a 5 minute block of someone just naming stuff or going down a tediously long list in some way and then it starts up with;
19 hours, 28 minutes, 22 seconds, Shuttle: Hey Ground Control!
19 hours, 28 minutes, 26 seconds , Ground Control; Yes, what is it?
19 hours, 28 minutes, 29 seconds, Shuttle: We got a problem up here!
19 hours, 28 minutes, 34 seconds, Ground control; What is the nature of your problem?
19 hours, 28 minutes, 41 seconds: Well it seems, blah blah blah.
Repeat this format for the next 3 and a half minutes straight.
by sawaflyingsaucer
3 Comments
I ran into this with some other books. Its one of those casualties of being an audiobook consumer when the author was really writing for the page.
This is SUPER obvious in the audiobooks (that’s how I noticed it too).
Mark Twain put lists of stuff his characters had, found, etc. in a lot of his books, a practice that reaches its zenith in “Huck Finn”. A sister-in-law who read the manuscript asked him about it, and he said something along the lines of detail building the literary environment, but the real reason was he loved writing them and readers loved reading them.