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« on: January 10, 2011, 06:19:58 PM »
Gurtie,
I love books too, but I've grown to love audiobooks. If you can get past your resistance, you might enjoy it more than you think.
I've spent pretty much my whole professional life as a historian, editor and library rat, have no television reception and didn't even have a TV for watching DVDs until a couple of years ago and probably still woudn't have one if the closest movie theater weren't 2 hours away. But in recent years I've come to take real pleasure in audiobooks.
It is a different medium, so not all books that work well in print work well on audio. There are some books that simply need to be read slowly, with reflection and pauses and leisure. These don't work as audiobooks - not much fun if you have to hit the pause button constantly.
Some books have difficult and convoluted arguments. These don't work either unless your mind is really well trained at following oral argument (a judge might be able to hand this).
If the reader is good, fiction and some nonfiction is great on audio. I honestly think I might have missed a lot of the humor in Angela's Ashes if not for Frank McCourt's reading of his own book. Perhaps not, but I think it's a decidely lighter book as read by McCourt. Since I didn't read it in print, I can't say for sure. And the best readers will bring something to the book. On the other hand, I tried to listen to Dave Egger's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but often felt that the reader was getting the intonation and cadence wrong. I could be wrong, but it wasn't the way I would read the book and just finally gave up (didn't find the story all that compelling either).
I got into audiobooks with a gradualist approach. My wife and I were reading the same trashy novel (christmas gift from her brother) and it was driving her nuts to not be able to talk about it, so we were on a long drive and she read aloud to catch me up.
From then on, we got into the habit of reading to each other on long drives. Then we started taking turns cleaning/reading. Rather than spend 30 minutes with both of us doing dishes, we'd take an hour and one person would read while the other did dishes. I would usually get the dishes, because I can do two things at once. When she was on dish duty, I'd invariably look up and she'd be standing there with a dish in her hand staring at me. We made it through the unabridged Les Miserables this way. The 125 pages on the Paris sewers were not, however, read in entirety.
Anyway, then we moved to a place where the roads are twistier and we couldn't read to each other without getting sick, so we started in on audiobooks and that accounts for 1/3 of the books we read on average at this point.
Part of the reading aloud and, now, listening to a book together is sharing a book with someone in a different way than when you read it solo, even if you're both reading it at the same time (we both recently read City of Thieves in the same week). Hard to explain or describe. I wouldn't say better or worse. Just different.
Reading aloud is, by the way, the original form of reading. I'm a sixteenth-century historian, and if you read books from the period, the preface often starts with "Dear reader or listener" because it was assumed that many if not most people would consume the book by listening rather than being the actual reader. Not totally sure of my facts here, but I believe the story is that Augustine of Hippo was impressed that Ambrose read silently, somewhat of a novelty at the time and many historians believe that silent reading didn't become truly common until the late Middle Ages.
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