It seems I now have good reason to think of all of those audio books I "read" as more than just a guilty pleasure. I have long considered them as books I have not really read, mostly because I am the type who survives by setting tiny rules for himself. Take a moment to read this from T.M. Luhrmann and published this week in the New York Times. I must not be the only one hobbled by the notion of a marked difference between reading a book and listening to one. As she says, "We tend to regard reading with our eyes as more serious, as more highbrow, than hearing a book read out loud." And yet, I have come to relish my time with audio books. I spend a great deal of time in my car and, other than listening to the Bob Edwards Show, there this no other way I more prefer to spend that time.
Luhrmann reminds us of our great and long history of storytelling and also that literacy is a relatively new element in our social fabric, a skill not so long ago reserved only for a certain sort. For far longer than they have been read, our stories have been sung and spoken and performed for one another. She points out, too, how a story heard rather than read allows us to experience it in wholly different ways.
"And so listening to a book is a different sensory experience than reading it. The inner imagining of the story becomes commingled with the outer senses -- my hands on the trowel, the scent of tansy in the breeze. The creation of this sensory richness was in fact an explicit goal of the oral reading of the Bible in the medieval European cloister, so that daily tasks would be infused with Scripture, and Scripture would be remembered through ordinary tasks."
For all of my setting apart of my audio book listening from my regular reading life, I remember and enjoy those books just as much as the printed ones. Listening to one very much involves more of me than just my imagination. Countless times I have found myself hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it tightly as the tension in a story stretches toward its pinnacle, miles of road passing beneath me unnoticed. I react to plot twists and to characters physically with gestures or audibly with gasps and I comment aloud and with exasperation, things I hardly ever do while reading a book held in my hand. Or, I am stunned into silence and find myself minutes down the road with my mouth still hanging open.
I will confess also to sitting in parking lots with the engine running or driving aimlessly around for stretches at a time as I savor a particularly good book. I suppose it is the equivalent of not being able to put one down, but it does seem a little more odd to not be able to get out of my car. There are even some books that I have come to think might be better in their audio book form than in their printed version. I am a fan of Frank Delaney, whose many books about Ireland are among my favorites to read (see especially the novel, Shannon), but to hear them read in an Irish accent seems to make the stories all the more real for me. I have yet to find any audio versions of James Joyce, but I imagine the same might be said for his works, too.
Some of the best memories of time spent with my daughter have been all the books I have read to her. I have written before of her growing out of having me read to her, but I have found that audio books have given us one more way of enjoying books together. In fact, she has challenged me. When she read, or actually, devoured, the Harry Potter series, I looked forward to watching the movies with her after she finished each volume, and I quickly became a fan myself. That, actually, might be a bit of an understatement. I seriously consider Severus Snape to be one of the best-written, multi-dimensional, complex characters in all of literature. Truly. And so, my daughter has now reversed our deal. At her urging, I am making use of my car time to plow through the audio books of the series while she awaits each one I finish so that we may watch the movie again together. And, as I "read" the Harry Potter books, my own words to her have come back around to me. The book is always better than the movie.
I was just this week given the opportunity to read to her once again. One of my daughter's teachers invited fathers to visit his class to take a turn reading to them a book they are reading together, Pam Munoz Ryan's, Esperanza Rising. It happens to be the case that dads are not always encouraged to be as actively involved at the school. So, not only do I appreciate this teacher's efforts to foster a love of reading among his students, but I was impressed at his obvious attempt to give the dads the kind of volunteer opportunity that might otherwise be directed toward the moms. I took him up on it. I really did not know what to expect. But, as I settled into the pages and looked up and out over that classroom to see them all so quiet, noses stuck in a book, I could see on their faces the same thing I get from my audio books -- the sheer, elemental human pleasure of hearing a story told to you.
I have gotten far more comfortable in recent years with the idea of rereading books. I once took a pretty firm stance that doing so was a waste of time that could be spent working through the infinite list of things I have yet to read. I have come to see the narrowness of that viewpoint, however, and now relish the occasional stirrings I have to binge on the likes of my favorites. I have been in the revisiting mood of late. It started when I discovered an Ivan Doig book I had forgotten I owned and had not yet read, his novel Prairie Nocturne. The main character in that book, a woman named Susan Duff, was a minor character in my favorite Doig book, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, which is the middle volume of what Doig calls his Montana Trilogy. Rascal Fair holds a permanent place on my list of Shipwreck Books. I remember the first time I read it and knowing within just a page or two that it would be a book I would love always. That is a joy, no? To begin reading something and to know nearly right away that you will be off in a world that will stay with you. So, as soon as I placed Prairie Nocturne back in its resting place there on the shelf, my finger automatically stretched just down the row to pull out Dancing at the Rascal Fair.
That got me thinking. What is it about such a book that causes me to be moved by it? It is hard to put a finger on such things, but I came up with a few. The prose itself, obviously. If there is such a thing as magic in the world, I see it when a writer gathers words onto a page in a way that seems as if they carry themselves. They are arranged as a score of music, rhythmically sound and tuned to just the right pitch, making something inside you dance.
Such as the following. Here is what awaits when you crack open the first book in Doig's Montana Trilogy, English Creek:
"That month of June swam into the Two Medicine country. In my life until then I had never seen the sidehills come so green, the coulees stay so spongy with runoff. A right amount of wet evidently could sweeten the universe. Already my father on his first high patrols had encountered cow elk drifting up and across the Continental Divide to their calving grounds on the west side. They, and the grass and the wild hay meadows and the benchland alfalfa, all were a good three weeks ahead of season. Which of course accounted for the fresh mood everywhere across the Two. As is always said, spring rain in range country is as if halves of ten-dollar bills are being handed around, with the other halves promised at shipping time. And so in the English Creek sheepmen, what few cowmen were left along Noon Creek and elsewhere, the out-east farmers, the storekeepers of Gros Ventre, our Forest Service people, in just everyone that start of June, hope was up and would stay strong as long as the grass did."
There you have it. June does not just come as the next page on the calendar. It swims in with an abundance of rain in a place that otherwise aches for it. In that small way he has told you so much about this place and yet allowed you to gather even more about it from what he has not told you. It is not enough rain, but the right amount of wet that does not just make things better, it sweetens the universe. And people are not simply feeling good about it. Hope was up. What a thing of beauty. It is one thing to say something; it is another to be able to tell it in a way that makes people feel it in their bones.
I have read all of Doig's work. His memoir of growing up in Montana, This House of Sky, is altogether the finest homage to a place as I have ever read. It is my opinion, though, that in a body of work that as a whole is of the highest quality a writer can produce, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is far and away his best. It is for me perhaps the penultimate example of the kind of writing that I wish to savor for a very long time. In it Doig is able to capture the full complexity of human life, both the lovely and the serene -- all that is to be savored -- and the anguish and the terribleness -- all that fills us with dread. What he has crafted with mere words is life shown among all its layers, in all its dimensions, cluttered by all its unanswerable questions, so clearly and so astoundingly rendered through lives not our own, but draped in the possibility that they could be.
And, of course, there is the way he writes the place. My own memories are both rested upon and bounded by a certain landscape. The shape of terrain, the carving paths of rivers and streams, the weather and wind, these help to tell the stories of places and the people that inhabit them. And how those people live upon the land and amongst one another. I most enjoy writing in which these things figure prominently.
From Dancing at the Rascal Fair:
"So, the widebrimmed Montana, this was. The Montana of plain arising to foothills ascending to mountains, the continent going through its restless change of mood right exactly here."
Passages like that make me smile. And wear out the pencils I keep nearby for underlining them. I have come to learn that reading a book of this sort once again makes it more and more a part of me. It makes for great pleasure to discover all over again the things that made you love something in the first place.
