{"id":434,"date":"2006-07-18T21:15:01","date_gmt":"2006-07-19T01:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=434"},"modified":"2024-03-24T21:45:32","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T01:45:32","slug":"palin_80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2006\/07\/palin_80\/","title":{"rendered":"Palin, Michael: Around the World in 80 Days<\/cite> (audio)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Palin has apparently made something of a post-Monty Python career out of travel books and TV series; his Around the World in 80 Days<\/cite><\/strong> was the first of these trips. As the title suggests, he’s attempting to emulate (the fictional) Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne’s book of the same title (Project Gutenberg page<\/a>), circumnavigating the globe without air travel. He was filmed as he went for a BBC documentary series [*], and then wrote a book in the months following. You can read the entire book online<\/a>, but I listened to it as an audiobook read by the author.<\/p>\n

[*] Which is apparently only available on DVD in a box set<\/a>, so we won’t be NetFlixing it, alas. It would have been interesting to compare the two. We’re going to try some of the more recent ones instead.<\/p>\n

This wasn’t stunningly funny or insightful, but it was a very agreeable way of passing several hours, and I laughed out loud a couple of times, such as when Palin was on a Chinese train:<\/p>\n

\n

As I return to the compartment, I find my way blocked by our attendant who is sloshing a filthy old mop across the floor of the corridor. It’s a painful process to watch, as the floor is carpeted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Possibly it works better out loud, because of the pacing.)<\/p>\n

You can get a pretty good sense of the writing from the web page, I think, so I’ll just talk briefly about this as an audiobook. Palin tends to put just a fraction<\/em> more silence between sentences than I expect, which was surprisingly hard to get used to. There was also music behind much of the narration, and I couldn’t quite figure out the pattern. Perhaps if I had it on CD or tape, it would have corresponded to divisions; but as one big file from Audible.com, any structure wasn’t clear to me. It wasn’t intrinsically intrusive, I was just occasionally distracted by wondering about it.<\/p>\n

Palin uses light accents when recounting conversations. He didn’t get to America until day 63, so I couldn’t judge how good he was until then; he doesn’t do the worst American accent I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty clearly identifiable as a British person doing an American accent (fortunately, I’ve become less sensitive after all these Agatha Christie radio plays). Then again, I don’t know whether skill at American accents can be generalized to skill at all accents; perhaps British and American English are close enough that it’s harder to convincingly go from one to the other. Anyone know more about this?<\/p>\n

Anyway, Audible has most of his other travel works; I’ve just picked up the next, Pole to Pole<\/cite>, and look forward to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Palin has apparently made something of a post-Monty Python career out of travel books and TV series; his Around the World in 80 Days was the first of these trips. As the title suggests, he’s attempting to emulate (the fictional) Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne’s book of the same title (Project Gutenberg page), circumnavigating … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Palin, Michael: Around the World in 80 Days<\/cite> (audio)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,118],"tags":[341],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-fiction","category-single-narrator-audio","tag-palin-michael"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2890,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions\/2890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}