On listening to books

It was something Brad East posted that inspired me to finally make the crossover to listening to audiobooks. I was convinced partly by the argument that most podcasts were a kind of pop culture junk food, even if well done, and that I could benefit from listening my way through whole books instead.

I began with McCaulley's Reading While Black, listened to between lockdown workout sessions at the park, and in my underground gym (it's in my garage), then I went on to Homer. I hadn't read Homer through in English in over 20 years (not that I've read all of Homer in Greek, don't mistake me!), but listening to it at length, in a good translation, with a trained actor's voice was a good, even profound, experience.

Photo by Oscar Ivan Esquivel Arteaga on Unsplash

And it was probably enough to tip me over to audiobooks as a habit. In some ways this feels like a revival of older habits though. The way 19th century people often experienced 'books', was having them read aloud to them in a parlor. The monastic rules call for readings of Scripture and theologians at meal times. Even Herodotus' Histories was read aloud as performance. Many peoples primary access to books has, and always was, orally and aurally. We have digitised it, privatised it, and that has its own issues, but it's refreshing to retrain the ear to listen to long-form writing as speech.

Of course there is the danger that one just becomes more of a semi-luddite snob, "oh, I listen to audiobooks, not trashy podcasts!" No, I don't mean to say that. Audiobooks provide me with a means, and a freedom, to listen to certain books in a different way, and experience them differently. Particularly books that I wouldn't necessarily read. I tend to listen to literary fiction now. Dostoyevsky is on at the moment. Other long books are also a good option. I am very slowly listening my way through Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. I still have a place for podcasts in my audio life. Two types in particular : interviews, and foreign-language podcasts. They fill a different gap in my information consumption.

In all this, the practice of listening to books is also a kind of training - the training of the mind to pay attention to well-read, long-form discourse delivered aurally. It is a skill that disappeared from much of our attention- and distraction- driven world, but it's a skill that can be cultivated, and I'm enjoying doing so.