Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, Now in a Different Voice

Kate's a big consumer of audio books, but I've never been able to listen to them. About five minutes in, I doze right off, every time. However, I know there are a lot of folks like Kate who love audio books and listen to them while commuting, so I'm very happy to announce that Audible is now selling an audio edition of Eureka.

This is the first of my books to get an audio edition, which is cool-- we actually sold audio rights to the first one, but I guess after they paid for it, they discovered that it has a whole bunch of pictures that are kind of integral to the book. At least, I'm guessing that's why it was never made...

I listened to the five-minute clip Audible has on their site, and it was a very strange experience, because the audio edition was narrated by Neil Hellegers. But they're my words, and my writing style is deliberately conversational, so I always hear those lines in my head in my own voice, with my own speaking cadence. And then there's the fact that there are some personal stories in there-- a reference to SteelyKid, and to the stamp collection I had as a kid-- and hearing somebody else's voice talk about SteelyKid as "our daughter" is profoundly odd.

He does, however, have a nice voice, with a faint trace of a British Isles sort of accent that my American ears hear as classy. So, you know, if you're an audio book person, check it out.

More like this

While I've seen him on tv a bunch of times (both on NOVA and on the Comedy Central fake-news shows), I have somehow managed not to read anything by Neil deGrasse Tyson before. I'm not sure how that happened. After his appearance on The Daily show last year, and especially after the Rubik's Cube…
Via Kate, a call for love songs. I like most of the songs on Kate's list, but as I tried to think of songs to add, I realized a couple of things: 1) I own more really good kiss-off songs than I do traditional love songs, and 2) even the songs that I like about loving relationships tend to be a…
There's a new-ish book review podcast covering pop-science books, BookLab, hosted by Dan Falk and Amanda Gefter, and their latest episode includes my Eureka as the third of three books being discussed (a bit more than 40 minutes in, though their discussion of the other books is also interesting…
I admit it, I'm a generalist in a world of specialists, and I always have been. Looking back on my career history, for example, I see the way I attempted to make the academic model of specialization adapt to my own taste for generalism - my doctoral project was a little bit insane, integrating…