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.

The thing I've realized about audiobooks in the last six months is that they are mnemonic creatures.

It started with the Christmas party my mother and I hosted for our choir in December. Our decorations needed a complete overhaul, and so I spent a month putting up or creating new ones. While I painted and decorated some wooden hanging letters – the "A" in "PEACE" is pictured above – I finished listening to Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis. And the strangest thing happened every time I looked at the completed letters. I felt sadness, a sharp but fleeting prick of it. To remain spoiler-free at this point, I will simply say that one of the main characters dies near the end of All Clear, and I was quite upset about it. Each time I glanced at the letters I had made, I remembered those feelings as if I had painted them into the two shades of blue I had used, or glued them alongside a neat bouquet of pinecones, twigs, and jute twine.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I've been going hiking about four to six hours a week, and listening to audiobooks when the scenery permits. Since where I live, we had a very unseasonable winter (i.e. no winter whatsoever), I've been doing this, in shorts, since January. Less so now, I suppose, as we move into summer. But the damage has been done: I've lost a few pounds, and every single trail that I've hiked is teeming with literary associations. In fact, I'm months late in making this post because of those associations. You see, I read the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth in those hills. Although I was making dinner at home when I finished chapter fifty of Allegiant (I had to stop chopping vegetables because I was crying so hard and couldn't see, and for the first time in my life, I gripped the kitchen counter for support), I nevertheless felt the same sadness I had with the PEACE letters every time I hiked. Sometimes a dull throb of mourning still rears its head as I round certain corners.

It's funny, though, because other than that, I could quite accurately give you a guided tour of the Divergent books through those hills. I get little flashes of memory at small landmarks or curves in the trail. Certain trees, and it feels like I am physically being tossed backward into that world. It's a pity I never discovered the trick while trying to study in school; it's the ultimate mnemonic device. And a little bit like Sherlock's "mind palace," to be perfectly honest.

I was going to go hiking and find one of these triggers to photograph, until I realized that there are too many for this series. It is, after all, the first series I listened to while hiking, and the trails were then unclaimed for me. So I'll just include a whole video I made of my favorite trail, back when things were still green.

There are three more audiobooks that left imprints for me, and I'll share them here as well. As I'm including quotes, there are minor spoilers at the very least. So tread cautiously.

Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare; it was green then,
and I came down a path near that tree.

Spoils. A gold locket, open to a daguerreotype of a laughing child. The locket was splattered with dried blood. Behind her Starkweather was talking about digging the silver bullets out of the bodies of freshly killed werewolves and melting them down to recast. There was a dish of such bullets, in fact, in one of the cabinets, filling a bloodstained bowl. Sets of vampire fangs, row on row of them. What looked like sheets of gossamer or delicate fabric, pressed under glass. Only on closer inspection did Tessa realize they were the wings of faeries. A goblin, like the one she had seen with Jessamine in Hyde Park, floating open-eyed in a large jar of preservative fluid. 

And the remains of warlocks. Mummified taloned hands, like Mrs. Black’s. A stripped skull, utterly de-fleshed, human-looking save that it had tusks instead of teeth. Vials of sludgy-looking blood. Starkweather was now talking about how much warlock parts, especially a warlock’s “mark,” could be sold for on the Downworld market. Tessa felt dizzy and hot, her eyes burning. 

Tessa turned around, her hands shaking. Jem and Will stood, looking at Starkweather with mute expressions of horror; the old man was holding up another hunting trophy—a human-looking head mounted to a backing. The skin had shriveled and gone gray, drawn back against the bones. Fleshless spiral horns protruded from the top of its skull. “Got this off a warlock I killed down by Leeds way,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the fight he put up—” 

Starkweather’s voice hollowed out, and Tessa felt herself suddenly cut free and floating. Darkness rushed up, and then there were arms around her, and Jem’s voice. Words floated by her in ragged scraps. “My fiancée—never seen spoils before—can’t stand blood—very delicate—” 

Tessa wanted to fight free of Jem, wanted to rush at Stark-weather and strike the old man, but she knew it would ruin everything if she did. She clenched her eyes shut and pressed her face against Jem’s chest, breathing him in. He smelled of soap and sandalwood. Then there were other hands on her, drawing her away from Jem. Starkweather’s maidservants. She heard Starkweather telling them to take her upstairs and help her to bed. She opened her eyes to see Jem’s troubled face as he looked after her, until the door of the spoils room closed between them. (111-112)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke;
coincidentally, the start of the trail pictured in the
video, and where I also read chapter two of Allegiant,
and realized what that meant for Tris.

"So Clegg stole this book?" said Lascelles to Childermass. "Is that what you are going to tell us?"

 "In a manner of speaking. In the autumn of 1754 Findhelm gave the book to Clegg and told him to deliver it to a man in the village of Bretton in the Derbyshire Peak. Why, I do not know. Clegg set off and on the second or third day of his journey he reached Sheffield. He stopped at a tavern, and there he fell in with a man, a blacksmith by trade, whose reputation as a drinker was almost as extraordinary as his own. They began a drinking contest that lasted two days and two nights. At first they simply drank to see which of them could drink the most, but on the second day they began to set each other mad, drunken challenges. There was a barrel of salted herrings in the corner. Clegg challenged the blacksmith to walk across a floor of herrings. An audience had gathered by this time and all the lookers-on and the loungers-about emptied out the herrings and paved the floor with fish. Then the blacksmith walked from one end of the room to the other till the floor was a stinking mess of pulped fish and the blacksmith was bloody from head to foot with all the falls he had taken. Then the blacksmith challenged Clegg to walk along the edge of the tavern roof. Clegg had been drunk for a whole day by this time. Time after time the onlookers thought he was about to fall and break his worthless neck, but he never did. Then Clegg challenged the blacksmith to roast and eat his shoes – which the blacksmith did – and finally, the blacksmith challenged Clegg to eat Robert Findhelm's book. Clegg tore it into strips and ate it piece by piece." (313)

This one is my favorite, just because of the coincidence. I was listening to The House of Hades by Rick Riordan while I tilled my raised garden bed several months ago in preparation for planting. It took me exactly the length of Calypso and Leo's story arc to finish. The video above is how the garden (and the rest of my yard) looked a while later, on Easter. It's quite different now.

“Holy Hephaestus,” Leo said. 

The path opened into the nicest garden Leo had ever seen. Not that he had spent a lot of time in gardens, but dang. On the left was an orchard and a vineyard – peach trees with red-golden fruit that smelled awesome in the warm sun, carefully pruned vines bursting with grapes, bowers of flowering jasmine and a bunch of other plants Leo couldn’t name. 

On the right were neat beds of vegetables and herbs, arranged like spokes around a big sparkling fountain where bronze satyrs spewed water into a central bowl. 

At the back of the garden, where the footpath ended, a cave opened in the side of a grassy hill. Compared to Bunker Nine back at camp, the entrance was tiny, but it was impressive in its own way. On either side, crystalline rock had been carved into glittering Grecian columns. The tops were fitted with a bronze rod that held silky white curtains. 

Leo’s nose was assaulted by good smells – cedar, juniper, jasmine, peaches and fresh herbs. The aroma from the cave really caught his attention – like beef stew cooking. 

He started towards the entrance. Seriously, how could he not? He stopped when he noticed the girl. She was kneeling in her vegetable garden, her back to Leo. She muttered to herself as she dug furiously with a trowel. 

Leo approached her from one side so she could see him. He didn’t feel like surprising her when she was armed with a sharp gardening implement. 

She kept cursing in Ancient Greek and stabbing at the dirt. She had flecks of soil all over her arms, her face and her white dress, but she didn’t seem to care. 

Leo could appreciate that. She looked better with a little mud – less like a beauty queen and more like an actual get-your-hands-dirty kind of person. (374-375)

Essentially, (and if you're still reading, congratulations to you and your attention span), there are about a million and one defenses I could make for audiobooks, but this one is my favorite.

Because the little pieces they leave behind never die off into the brush and thistles, but continue to resonate and keep the stories alive.