“I listen Lots of books on audio. This one works for me. But some of my comparative literature friends say it’s not even reading.part of me want read More, but I find it easier to listen to. What do you think? Should I care? “
– easy listening
Dear Yi,
I don’t believe too much what your “literary” friends say. They sound boring. At the end of the day, the people who think about reading in terms of “importance”—those who religiously log their daily reading metrics and count the titles of books they read on Goodreads—don’t seem to really like all books that much. Their moral blues are evident in the degree to which reading becomes akin to exercise, with readers tracking their word count metrics, trying to increase their speed, and joining clubs to hold them accountable.
While some followers of this culture are quick to dismiss audiobooks as a shortcut, they can’t seem to agree on why listening is an inferior form of engagement. Some cited research showing that people who listen to books retain less than those who read, which has to do with the temptation to do other things while listening to books. (It’s as easy as multitasking with audiobooks, but the format does make it harder to get back to the passage where you start to wander after a period of distraction.) Others insist that audiobooks eliminate the reader’s interpretation of things like satire The responsibility for things, tone and tone of voice, because the person who taped it was doing the job of conveying emotion. According to this rather fragile logic, listening to an audiobook is inferior precisely because it’s easier — because it lacks the element of pain that is indisputable proof of achievement, just as soreness is proof of real exercise.
The bigger problem, however, is seeing books as a means to other ends. Many people eager to read more are motivated by the promise that doing so can prevent cognitive decline, improve brain connectivity, or boost emotional intelligence. Even the obsession with memory assumes that the purpose of reading is to absorb knowledge or trivia that can be used to demonstrate literacy or “read well.” All of this belies the possibility that books could be a source of inner pleasure, an end in itself. I’m willing to bet, Easy Listening, that your earliest experiences of literary pleasure are auditory. Before we learn to read ourselves, most of us have been read aloud by adults, and listening to audiobooks recalls the unique joy of being told a story: the rhythm of prose is reflected in the human voice; dialogue is made possible by the performance of skilled readers Come to life; our eyes are freed from the pages and can easily roam freely around the bedroom (or the cardio room, or the scenery outside the windshield of the car) to better imagine the action of the narrative.
Oral storytelling predates writing by thousands of years, and many of the oldest stories in our literary canon existed as minstrels for centuries before they were published. Homeric epics may have originated with bards who told them about fires and improvised their central nodal points, and these stories were passed down and adapted from generation to generation. Evolutionary biologists have a variety of conjectures about the utilitarian function of these rituals — storytelling may have emerged to deepen community bonds, or to simulate unfamiliar situations in ways that might increase chances of survival — but I doubt that these cultures Whether the members of the book consciously think, because there are so many readers today, about how narrative exposure can enhance their short-term memory or improve their empathy skills. Instead, they listen to stories because, simply, they are overwhelmed by their power.
These early stories were primarily written in poetry, at a time when poetry, music and storytelling were often intertwined and indistinguishable. And I suspect fans of audiobooks, at least in part, enjoy listening because it’s easier to discern the melodic quality of prose, which tends to get lost when we quickly scan a page of text without actually hearing the words in our heads. There is some evidence that, as opposed to reading, listening affects the right hemisphere of the brain, which is more associated with music, poetry and spirituality. This may explain why some religious texts are designed to be read aloud.Scholar Karen Armstrong recently pointed out that the term Quran Meaning “to recite,” the many repetitions and variations of scriptures can only have their full effect when voiced by a gifted reciter, which, as she puts it, “helps people slow down their mental processes and enter into different modes of consciousness. .”
If you’re like most people I know, you may have a hard time recalling when the last book — no matter how you consumed it — successfully changed your consciousness. Even your desire to “read more” contains a tinge of compulsion, suggesting that many of the books you come across fall short of their extraordinary potential. Anxieties about post-literacy tend to focus on the medium, with audiobooks often hailed as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, alongside social media, visual entertainment, and declining attention spans. But it seems to me that there is a more obvious explanation for why reading often feels so dull: most books suck. The vast majority of them are uninspired, unconvincing, and poorly written. That’s always been the case (of course, with some failures even in those old bardic epics), though that fact becomes more elusive when we’re led to believe that reading shouldn’t be enjoyable. When a culture becomes obsessed with “reading challenges” and daily word count goals, it’s easy to get used to the poor quality text we choose, and harder to object to the many objectionable text qualities. Books provided.
