In the literary magazine n+1 (@nplusonemag), Maggie Gram (@maggiegram) writes about the wonder and love of listening to audio books.
Audio books are good for people driving cars because they are good at occupying part but not all of one’s attention. For me this is also true of regular books: I am a profoundly distractible reader, like a raccoon tasked with doing something tedious in a vast field of shiny objects. But while when I’m trying to read a regular book my focus takes a sort of oscillating form—now I’m reading, now I’m distracted, now I’m reading again—with audio books it’s more like sustained equilibrium. Maybe 60 percent of my attention is going to the Audio book; the other 40 percent is absorbed by something else. The exact balance shifts, but most of the time I am actually doing both things.
This is part of the appeal. Since the 1980s there have been more sighted people than blind people listening to audio books, and most of us have done so because we were also doing something else. Audio books are good for long trips. They are also good for housework, although they can be drowned out by a vacuum. I started listening to audio books because I was reading for my first set of graduate-school qualifying exams. My list of books seemed endless, and I thought that listening to some of them on mp3 might solve the problem of having too little time to read. Or rather, too little time to both read and run. With audio books I could do both at the same time.
The possibility of reading while also doing something else produces one of the stranger phenomenological characteristics of audio book reading: you can have a whole set of unrelated and real (if only partially attended) experiences while simultaneously experiencing a book. You live in two worlds at once. My first audio book was Flo Gibson’s recording of The Mill on the Floss, which, by the way, is one of the very great audio books: the sound is scratchy, but Gibson’s voice is confident and almost conspiratorial, warm and intimate and pleased to be recounting a story she knows you will be glad to have heard. I listened to it running by the Charles River with earbuds in my ears, and three years later I still associate certain spots along the Charles with scenes from the novel’s Dorlcote Mill. I also remember exactly where along the Weeks Footbridge Lucy Deane marveled at how beautiful Maggie Tulliver looks in shabby clothes. I think of it whenever I pass that spot, which means I think of it most days.
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