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.

Falling Slowly

The most curious books to me are the ones which demand to be read slowly. 

I am the sort of person who reads a lot, and what some would call quickly. Each year, I keep a spreadsheet of the books I've read, and from 2008 to 2013, I have devoured, on average, seventy-one books annually. Since I started keeping track in 2008 (The Jane Austen Year), I vowed to read no fewer than fifty books, and have thus far succeeded, while reaching no higher than one hundred books in 2011 (or, The Year I Got a Nook). The fact that I have kept my vow might indicate that not only am I a voracious reader, but a fast one.

This is untrue. I am, rather, a devoted reader. I can, and will, sit immobile for hours, with only the swish and flick of my wrist, the rise and fall of my chest, to indicate that I am even still alive. The reason I finished that book you loaned me in one day is not because I was able to read it in two hours, at that superhuman speed of terrified college students right before an exam; nor is it because I skipped and skimmed, which I abhor. It is simply because I curled up somewhere, all day, and read the damn thing, plodding along at the comfortable pace of Bilbo Baggins, pre-Adventure.

From this habit, I have developed a preference for books which can actually be read in one sitting. Of course, I can't and don't always read books in one sitting. But I seem to be most comfortable picking up ones with no more than around three hundred and fifty pages. For instance, I've recently been tearing through Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms series. While I think I've only read one of them in one day, I am reassured by the fact that I could do so, if I felt like it. For some reason, this satisfies my shortening attention span, and I carry on.

However, when I pick up a big, fat book – let's say a book of six hundred and one pages, like Steinbeck's East of Eden – I suddenly feel not only daunted, but alarmed. My attention span revolts. I am like a toddler in a high chair, my bib strapped on, my legs secured, watching with my mouth stubbornly pursed as my mother zooms a spoonful of food toward it. Maybe that spoonful of food will be delicious. Maybe it's not pureed peas after all. Maybe it's pudding. Pudding! Glorious pudding! (What do I know about the colors of foods? I'm a baby.) Even if it were my own hand doing the feeding, I don't want to be strapped down here for the lengthy time it's going to take to eat the whole jar of peas-or-pudding. I'd rather grab a cookie so that I can waddle around in my diaper and have done with it. (I'm going to abandon this metaphor now; I could feel it crumbling as it began.)

East of Eden is a beautiful book, much more beautiful than I ever expected, having read other Steinbeck classics in school in a manner much more suited to my baby food metaphor above. But I still freaked out when I brought it home from the library, because I knew I couldn't read it one one day. That meant I had to set page goals, like I did with Victor Hugo's Les Misérables: one hundred pages per day. At least. And then I would be free to do whatever else I liked. Which, for Les Mis, was probably schoolwork. 

I am done with school now, and am unemployed, which means I don't have a whole lot else to do but read. I read East of Eden in three days. Not necessarily because the entire thing is a page-turner – it's not, not entirely. I read it in three days because it was the only way to quell the hounds of my impatience and unease. I had to force myself to read a book that I loved. 

Obviously, that's somewhat problematic. It's problematic that I feel the need to stuff my face to the point of pain, instead of enjoying a normal, comfortable pace of reading. It's problematic that I can't, in almost every case.

Sometimes, with shorter, possibly-read-it-in-a-day books, I try to go slow. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, for instance, was recommended as a book to be savored. The online recommendation that I read told me explicitly not to read it in one sitting. I probably tried to follow that advice, or if not with that book particularly, then any other book like it. The trouble with really good, possibly-read-it-in-a-day books, is that I can't stop myself from finishing them. The pressure of more than a day's commitment gone, the disappointment of discovering nothing more than pulp fiction eviscerated, how can I not carry on into the wee dark hours of the morning, into that exhausting, confusing time when the early birds really do come out early – out of time, just like me? There is something to be said, after all, of finishing a book at three in the morning, and then sinking away almost the very moment you turn the light out.

And so when I say that the books I find most curious are the ones that demand to be read slowly, I think you will understand that this phenomenon is not merely a curiosity, but an epiphany. It is the rarest creature that I ever stumble upon, because each time I do, I have forgotten that such a creature exists outside of mythology. I cannot, in fact, name another book of this species, except for the one that I am reading, on and off, right now: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

Perhaps it is too soon to be making this post. I am, after all, only exactly one hundred pages in (a chapter break that pleased me greatly), with almost seven hundred left to go. The day I started it, though, I found myself compelled to prop it somewhere comfortably on my bed, and read aloud from it for several pages, in a terrible, off-puttingly inaccurate English accent. I have been switching off between reading it quickly in my head, and stumbling over the words out loud (I am a terrible speaker), slowing down the process even more than the extensive footnotes do. For the first time that I can remember, I am enjoying the process. I don't mind setting it aside to do other things, read other things. I've preemptively renewed the book from my library, so I have a full month left in which to peruse it. Not only do I feel unstressed about the extended deadline, but in a way, I want to feel every day of it. I want, inexplicably, to take the next thirty-two days to feel this novel patience and indulgence.

I may find out soon that I despise this book, and throw it aside in disgust or boredom. I may indeed discover that it is a page-turner in disguise, and finish it after only a few days of dedicated reading, whenever they may occur. But for right now, as I simultaneously fly through several possibly-read-it-in-a-day books, I am operating under the illusion that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will allow me to fall slowly, and breathe in the magic.