In Defense of Audiobooks

[Levi] flopped down at the head of her bed. “Normally, I listen to the audiobook.” 

“That counts as reading,” Cath said, sitting at her desk. 

“It does?” 

“Of course.” 

He kicked one of the legs of her chair playfully, then rested his feet there, on the rail. “Well, then, never mind. I guess I have read lots of books....”

- Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, page 170

I am, shall we say, a little bit fond of audiobooks. A not insignificant portion of the books I read each year are in that format, or at least partially in that format. The numbers get tricky – seventeen percent this year so far, thirty-four percent last year – because sometimes I switch between formats. Sometimes, I love a book so much I have to be reading it constantly, even when I need my hands free, so I switch back and forth between tangible and intangible copies; sometimes, I'm too impatient to go at the pace of the reader, and transfer my attentions to print; and sometimes, the only thing that will drag my sorry carcass through a book is having someone read it to me.

I could say many things in defense of audiobooks, as they seem to always need defending. I constantly hear people invalidating them as a form, claiming that "they don't count as reading." I ask you, though, what more is reading than the digestion of established stories? When I listened to the audiobooks for the Harry Potter series a couple of years ago, were they not the same books that I read and loved as a child, that shaped me through my adolescence and beyond, that I clutched to my chest in white-knuckled fear or sadness, whose pages I stroked and inevitably smudged and creased after the seventh pass-through?

I have a whole spiel. 

I could talk about my love of multitasking, and dislike for pure idleness, how it's wonderful to read while you're folding laundry, or knitting the long cabled socks that will become your mother's Christmas present. I could talk about the bus rides to and from high school, then to and from my college campus multiple times per day, and how I get motion sick when I try to read even so much as a map.

I could talk about how I've listened to The Host by Stephenie Meyer nine times since 2008, when it's a twenty-three-hour audiobook, because I've come to associate it with escapism and calming. How I used to come home from my senior year in high school, sinking down into my bed in my darkened room, and listen with my eyes closed, because I was too exhausted and stressed and miserable to do anything else. How, in college, I started listening to it once per quarter when things got bad, writing in November of 2011, "This book is my de-stressor. When I start to get overwhelmed each quarter, I pull out The Host. My fingers start to twitch and I long for it. I won’t feel okay until I hear the opening music."

But I think I'd like to be a little bit less dramatic.

Falling a Little Too Slowly (Oops)

In the interests of honesty and the ruination of profundity, I must confess: I have only just now finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Oops. 

Back in February, I concluded a post about the book by positing two paths for my reading to take: that I would either toss the book aside entirely, or swallow it whole in the next few days. The path I did not mention, however, was the one I knew was most likely to come to pass: that by posting about my enjoyment of a book one-eighth of the way through it, I would be cursing myself into toiling through it for an extended period of time out of some sort of demented hyper-self-fulfilling prophecy. 

It's funny, because I almost didn't publish that post, for that very reason. I thought that perhaps I should wait, save it for later. But hubris reared its ugly head; I was proud of my little post, of the use of language, of the earnestness; and so I tamped down the prickling sensation in the back of my mind and clicked.

Naturally, in response, the universe chuckled. You want to fall slowly? it asked. Well then. So you shall.

I've been falling through molasses ever since.

Not that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is in any way a bad book. On the contrary, it's quite engaging across all the necessary planes of plot, characterizations, prose, and use of magic. Certainly, the voice is a little dry, as it stylistically mimics nineteenth-century texts, and I for some reason no longer have much of a tolerance for anything much older than a half-century. And certainly, the footnotes and their teeny font wreaked havoc on my eyes and my attention span, causing disruption where there would ordinarily have built up a consistent pace and flow. And yes, the book is very, very long.

Long, but good.

Which is why, after renewing it and renewing it from the library, and setting it aside for other, shinier books in the meantime, and then, upon picking at it a bit more, finally realizing the damned thing was too heavy to be read in a comfortable position anyway, I hiked back down to return it. Then I tracked it down on ebook, so I could continue reading on my Nook. 

I read approximately a hundred pages more before, yet again, setting it aside for other books. 

Yet I did not despair. I was determined; and so I put the audiobook onto my iPod, to which I could listen for the four to six hours a week I was going hiking.

Coincidentally, did you know that the hills where I live are very beautiful and verdant after the early spring rains, and demand to be enjoyed in the relative silence of birdsong after the distant gusts of traffic melt further and further away with each bend in the path? (Whew.) I did not.

It was around this point where I guiltily remembered that dreaded post I had made. Returning to it, I sighed, and removed the cover image I had included, as if that could detract all the attentions of my imaginary readership away from my bold declarations. As if that could somehow diminish my own sense of failure.

For a while, I didn't read much of anything at all, and hiked in natural ambiance. 

And then, slowly, slowly, I fell again.

And kept going.

And between the past two days, while I spent roughly eight hours preparing freezer meals, gardening, and cleaning, I fell, and I listened, and my waning attention waxed until I realized just what it was that I had been missing. 

It is a great pity that I could not have read the whole thing all at once, because those four hour chunks had me the most engaged I had been since the first one hundred printed pages. But then again, I suppose I should not have gotten quite so attached had finishing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell not become such a thing of accomplishment.