Here’s a nice coincidence: I’m currently reading Andy Remic’s novel War Machine (and loving it so far), and I just discovered via Fantasy Book Critic that Remic will is putting out his novels War Machine and Spiral on the internet as podcasts, read by Andy Remic with background music provided by rock band the3 m1ss1ng.  They’ll be coming out at about a chapter a week on Podiobooks.com.

I think this is a really cool idea.  I especially like the musical aspect- I’ve written before about the combination of music and books, and the idea of a book “soundtrack,” so it’s great to see it actually being made a reality.  I look forward to seeing how this progresses.

My apologies for the silence. Real life intruded rather nastily over the last few days.

Interesting post at Boing Boing- the new Neal Stephenson book Anathem has its own original soundtrack CD. I’ve long thought that it would be cool if books had soundtracks, either an original score or just a compilation of appropriate music. I know the cost would be prohibitive, unless perhaps you limited yourself to old public domain recordings, but I can dream.

I often listen to music while I read. I don’t pick music according to the book- I have a big CD collection that I just rotate through, keeping about six albums in my changer at a time and listening to each a few times before swapping them out- but sometimes the book and the music synch up in cool ways. During one of the climactic parts of Glen Cook’s Soldiers Live, for instance, I had Amon Amarth’s Fate of Norns on, and it was just perfect- epic military fantasy and Swedish death metal. Can life get better than that? No, sir. Well, not legally.