Easy Ways To Ruin Good Literature

Bad Choices... Bad, bad, choices. You've been a bad choice.

This Week: Audiobook Accidents

When looking for someone to read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy -consisting of All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain- for its audiobook version, some halfwitted executive at Random House who could not have possibly read McCarthy's works threw -for reasons both unexplained and unexplainable- Brad Pitt's name into the mix. Unfortunately, it stuck, and -thus- we can now safely assume that Brad Pitt has read at least -and quite possibly only- three books in his life. Needless to say, all three audiobooks are abridged versions of the original novels. One must wonder whether the width of Mr. Pitt's vocabulary -one hundred and two words, by my calculations, counting the word "yeah" no less than three times, to bump up the numbers- had anything to do with the aforementioned abridgement. (Pst, Brad... Hey, sorry, I should probably explain what both "aforementioned" and "abridgement" mean, right? "I said it before" and "shorty-shorty short-short," respectively. And "respectively" means "each one, in the aforementioned order.")

Communicating with morons is harder than it might seem from afar. Audiolibrarians all over the land shall despair at the sound of these, as much as cinephiles despaired upon hearing that Matt Damon had been cast as John Grady Cole in the film adaptation of All The Pretty Horses.