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Illustration by Drew Shannon
Recently, at a meeting of my book club, a.k.a., the neighbourhood guys’ excuse to go out for a couple of pints club, I was discussing a certain passage of interest, when somebody asked me what chapter it was from. At a bit of a loss, I stated that this part of our book was about half an hour from the end.
At this point, everyone turned to stare at me, and it quickly became apparent that I was the only one who listened to the book instead of reading it. After which, the book itself was pretty much forgotten and the discussion devolved into a heated argument about the merits, or lack thereof, for each method of absorbing a story.
Many people seem to think that the idea of listening to a book is a relatively new and inferior phenomenon that somehow perverts the real and original method of turning the pages of a physical object held in one’s hands. This ignores the fact that for most of human history, the spoken word was the only way that a culture’s stories were passed on. Even the Latin version of the Bible was closely guarded by the church for centuries, such that lay people would not be able to read it and thus relied solely on the church to orally pass on the scriptures
Many in my book club felt that to listen to a story could in no way be called reading. It was a less fulfilling, less intellectually stimulating, and somehow equal to cheating.
But I counter the “less fulfilling” argument with my experiences now walking the dog. I used to find myself walking mindlessly around for long periods of time, with little to occupy my thoughts except to wonder if I remembered to bring any poop bags. Since starting to listen to audiobooks however, I have used this time to both entertain and, dare I say, educate myself, going through dozens of books a year, and successfully blocking out the noise of people yelling at me to pick up after my dog.
I must admit that when I read a book, I often tend to skip over many descriptive passages that I don’t feel are somehow moving the plot along quickly enough. With an audio story though, I consume the entire book, and if I want, I can even speed it up to 1½ or two times the regular speed, which technically speaking could perhaps be called cheating, but it does allow me to go through twice the number of books in the same time period of time.
I also love to listen to books while driving long distances. Getting caught up in a story is a sure fire way to keep me awake and interested, as opposed to the tedium of listening to the same news stories or music over and over again. Of course, much of the success of a spoken book rests with the skill of the reader, how well they take on the role of different characters, or even the opposite gender. Sometimes the readers ignite my self-righteous indignation when they mispronounce a word or name of a historical character.
It’s not that I don’t love the printed word. A few years ago, I visited one of the world’s earliest printing presses in Antwerp, dating back to about 1600 and still located in it’s original building. I was totally enthralled by the museum and the discovery of this amazing process that brought so much literature to so many people. It was so much more interesting than any potential museum showing the history of the ear-pod.
And a few Christmases ago, my daughter introduced the idea of cutting back our gifts to just one book, given anonymously along with a poem that would make the family guess the nature of the book and the person it might be addressed to. And though I love my audiobooks, I treasure this hard-copy gift every year – more than any story I have ever listened to. I love to flatten the pages and slowly turn them over, underlining passages I want to remember, and even noting how much I’ve read and how much is left to go. Wanting to get to the end, but not really wanting it to be over.
When I was young, I spent many months backpacking through Europe, with space so limited that I ripped out the pages of my book after I had read them, just to reduce the weight I had to carry. It makes me cringe now to think about how I could desecrate a book like that.
So while my friends haven’t kicked me out of our book club yet, I still proudly reserve the right to listen to my stories and, should they continue to complain, I can always just turn up the volume.
Douglas Lawrence lives in Toronto.
