AUDIO

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.