As with the rise of e-books, the increasing popularity of audiobooks is a phenomenon that booksellers, writers and other literary folks have kept an attentive eye on for a while.
In the case of e-books, some of us have wondered what possesses our family members, spouses and children to stare at the little glaring screen of an e-reader, while in turn, they tell us we’re nuts to stuff a knapsack full of heavy books before we go away on vacation. Why do we turn up our noses at the 8-ounce e-reader when it can hold infinitely more books, each weighing less than a mote of dust, than a knapsack can?
Similarly, because the people I know who like audiobooks generally listen to them in their cars, I’ve wondered how a person can safely navigate the streets while paying close attention to the voice of the actor reading “War and Peace” or “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.” If you also like to drive with the windows down, wouldn’t you forever be rewinding to try to catch some crucial detail that a horn blast or an ambulance siren just drowned out?
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A couple of months ago, I decided to answer these questions for myself when I had three consecutive teaching jobs lined up in Indiana and Michigan during the first 20 days of June. All told, I would have to spend close to 24 hours in my car driving to and from these jobs, and instead of listening to static-ridden radio or CD mixes of songs I’d already heard countless times, I went to the Evanston Public Library and looked over their selection of audiobooks.
To my surprise, up on the second floor near the DVDs and music CDs, they had an extensive sample in audio format of the library’s print holdings: dozens of adult fiction titles, biographies and other nonfiction books, many young adult and children’s titles too.
I felt a surge of readerly greed — I could check out 10 audiobooks! But I squelched this impulse because I knew I’d be lucky to get through two during my travels. Two of the three books I checked out were titles I had at home and had been meaning to read for a while: Meg Wolitzer’s “The Ten-Year Nap” and Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World.” The third book was Adam Johnson’s “The Orphan Master’s Son.”
Wolitzer’s and Jones’ books were each contained on a series of 11 and 12 scrupulously sleeved CDs, respectively. Johnson’s novel was enormous — probably 20 or more CDs (I didn’t ever get to it). I was impressed by its heft, and by the ghosts of the previous “readers” who had committed to listening to every last word. Of the three, it was Wolitzer’s novel that I listened to in its entirety, perhaps because I knew it would likely be funny, and I thought it might also permit me brief lapses in attention without the story going disastrously off the rails.
When I was distracted by something on the road, however, I always backtracked to listen to that section again (each CD was divided into 20-22 three- to four-minute tracks), just as I would have done if I’d had the paper version in my hands and had read a passage without registering it.
This impulse to absorb every word was at the core of the strangeness of listening to someone read Wolitzer’s 383-page novel to me. Hearing the book read aloud instead of seeing every word on the page made me feel as if my brain had been split in half — one side was trying to visualize the words, the other side was hearing them.
I have been to dozens of live readings in bookstores and at universities, but that experience is markedly different. At a reading, you’re only listening to a small part of a book, and in most cases, the author doesn’t read for more than 30-45 minutes. Here you’re taking a dip in a pool, not swimming the English Channel.
There’s also the chance that you won’t like the style of the person hired to read the audiobook. The woman who read “The Ten-Year Nap” (“performed” is probably a better term, considering the many voices and accents she had to produce) is a veteran of more than 200 audiobook readings and a skilled actor. Yet almost immediately her voice began to grate on me: its martinet-like quality, the way she pronounced “pretty.” I had to figure out how to ignore these traits if I intended to finish the book. Being held captive in my car for so many miles was also strong encouragement. If I had been listening closer to home, I would have soon turned to the print version instead.
After “The Ten-Year Nap” ended, I moved on to “The Known World.” The actor reading this book had a more agreeable voice, but he spoke less clearly, and I had a harder time catching all the words. Within a few hours of beginning that book, I was home, at last, and returned all three audiobooks to the library the next day.
I do know that despite paper books being my undisputed preference, I will listen to another audiobook the next time I have to drive anywhere that’s more than an hour or two away. For one, it seems an ideal way to multi-task, but also, I suspect the more I use this medium, the better I’ll become at listening, a skill I know I’m not alone in valuing.
Christine Sneed is the author of the novel “Little Known Facts” and the story collection “Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry.”