Another vote for not beg able to follow an audiobook! I don't have nearly the capacity for retaining what I hear over what I read. We'll run them for long car trips, but otherwise, I just don't.

You want brainless action where two-fisted threat-snarling he-men get the drop on one another with laser pistols while spaceships whirl hopelessly to shrieking destruction in deathtrap gravity wells and the lone pneumatic schoolgirl love interest screams and turns her ankle running away from the lust-driven chief robot, you want somebody other than Asimov. Fortunately, there's plenty of it out there for you.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, older narrator Jean Louise reports a conversation her younger self, Scout, had with Miss Maudie Atkinson about the notorious neighborhood recluse Boo Radley. Scout tells Miss Maudie the rumors about Boo, and Miss Maudie dismisses them with disdain, blaming them in part on local gossip Stephanie Crawford.

"Stephanie once told me that she woke up in the middle of the night and Boo was standing by her bed, looking down at her," Miss Maudie says. "I asked her, 'What did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him?' That shut her up."

Jean Louise comments, "I was sure it did. Miss Maudie's voice was enough to shut anyone up."

Took me years to get that joke.

There's a super-famous example of this very thing that linguists often cite as a clue to the divergence of languages from a common root. I've forgotten the specifics, but it comes down to two kings/war-leaders/chieftains taking an oath of friendship. One of the big dudes spoke French and the other German. So the French speaker delivered his oath in German so the German-speaking troops could hear and understand him, and the German-speaking dude dutifully followed up by repeating HIS oath in French so the French-speaking troops would know what he was promising. I was like, cool, that's neat, but the significance of this is it's the first recorded instance of French and German having diverged sufficiently from their common predecessor language as to be unintelligible to someone who didn't speak French/German.

Finding translators has been a real challenge in international relations for as long as there have BEEN international relations. The problem is that there's not a huge amount of material in the historic record as to how this was handled.

We know that Sacagawea was enough of an expert in Native Sign Language (as it existed at the time) that she was able to teach a lot of it to the Lewis & Clark party.

The pre-Renaissance reclamation of ancient Greek-language texts on natural science, literature, philosophy, art, mathematics, engineering, and astronomy relied on European monks finding translators who spoke Greek, Latin, and Arabic, and who were also scholarly enough to be able to explain the contents to the monks doing the transcribing. Legend has it this is how we got the symbol for "zero"; the monk was puzzled by the concept, so the translator obligingly recommended that he just draw a little hole in the middle of the equation.

Too, there's the example of La Malinche (a title, not her name, which has been lost) making great use of her multilingual skills to help Cortez destroy the Aztecs.

This particular story isn't told too often, but in the aftermath of the Second World War, displaced persons all over Europe took to the roads to try to walk home. As the roads got larger, the displaced found themselves sharing with the victorious military. At select crossroads, the Allies stationed multilingual Europeans who had survived the mayhem to talk to the displaced people, getting their names, home locations, and stories to help with what must have been a world-class traffic jam.

I guess, if contemporary civilization collapses, anyone who is multilingual is gonna be very, very prized.

I can't remember where I saw this, but apparently the later Victorians offered the excuse that women who engaged in sex work were nymphomaniacs who just weren't getting the gold pipe at home. You know, anything rather than admit that their society was structured specifically to keep women desperate and dependent, and that that could be changed.

Maybe it's like in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. When the narrative for the past century and a quarter has been "The victims were engaging in a risky line of work, so obviously they were gonna get whacked" instead of admitting that at least three-fifths of them had no discernible involvement with sex work, perhaps Rubenhold perceived a need for clear, repeated, unrelenting emphasis. Like... if everyone else has always said that every woman targeted by this murderer was engaging in sex work, despite a lack of evidence, I could excuse Rubenhold for pointing out say, three, four hundred times that that's just an assumption.

Many, MANY years ago, I got a wonderful book called The Gay Book of Days by Martin Greif. It had small essays on historical figures who were/might have been LGBTQ+. I've always remembered his essay on Robert Graves. Apparently, Graves once said that his novels were his dog-and-pony show and were intended to maintain his cat, which was poetry. That might have some bearing on the common observation that Claudius the God is 99% stuffing.