The Magic of Audiobooks

From The Globe and Mail:

A couple of years ago, Audible.com – the Amazon-owned company that produces more than 90 per cent of North America’s audiobooks – had a sale, and Mr. Pearson picked up a shelfload of classics. (He’s also a fan of the Toronto Public Library’s free audiobook borrowing app.) It took him three months to listen to all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. “That was a book I’d started a couple of times and never got engaged in. I owned the whole set. And it’s one of those things that just stares you down. But when you’re listening, it’s not as intimidating.“

That’s the first commandment of the audiobook kingdom: If you have always wanted to read a classic, but could never engage, try listening to it instead. It doesn’t always work: Fact-filled non-fiction can be a dry listen (especially if it’s verveless, stylistically), and some novels don’t translate well to audio. Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, a novel about a woman who travels incessantly, is too aphoristic to work in the ear. But it’s a sharply funny read. The old view, the traditional, serious, High Lit view, was that reading one’s writing aloud was cheating; it encouraged the addition of emotional inflection where possibly insufficient inflection existed, “making what I’ve written seem for the moment better than it is,” as Nicholson Baker once put it. (He nevertheless narrates the audiobook of one of his own later novels, Traveling Sprinkler, to good effect.) But that point of view is now so old-fashioned, so starkly predigital and non-commercial, that it ought to have its own diorama in a museum. Here’s the new, alternative approach: If an audiobook gets you to ingest War and Peace or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet and surrender to points of view other than your own, so much the better. (Read more.)

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