Carrying on the Aural Tradition
On the benefits and joys of audiobooks
This Fall, I have had more families and seniors asking me to do their photos for them than I ever have before. It’s been wonderful to have so many photoshoots, and the chance to stretch my photography muscles even more. It also means that for the past few months my kids’ nap time and bedtimes, my normal reading time during the day, have been spent editing and working on photos. And while I enjoy photography a lot, my to be read list had been languishing. Enter: Audiobooks.
While nothing can quite rival the experience of holding a physical book in your hands, I think audiobooks come close. One of their main advantages is the ability to do something else while listening. Editing photos on the computer? Driving on a long road trip? Catching up on laundry? You can make all of these so much more interesting and enjoyable by listening to an audiobook while doing them. And you can cross another book off your list just by doing your other daily tasks.
I have some great memories of listening to audiobooks. As a child, my siblings and I listened to audiobooks every night when falling asleep. We especially loved Narnia and Harry Potter, and had much of the books memorized by the constant aural repetition every night. While nursing some of my newborn babies in the night I have listened to many different audiobooks to help stay awake, and have especially fond memories of listening to Pride and Prejudice, the perfect happy comfort read for me. My kids and I just listened to the whole book of Winnie the Pooh on our last road trip, and despite having listened to it many times with them, it was still a wonderful and funny story. Currently I am listening to the Iliad, and the act of listening to this story that was originally always listened to has really opened up a lot of things I had not noticed in my past reading.
Listening to books is the oldest way of telling stories, as until the printing press it was nearly impossible for the average person to own any book at all, and even for many years afterwards people did not have the ability to own extensive libraries. The two pinnacles standing at the beginning of Western literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were of course oral stories that now in the modern world most people simply read. But listening to them, as the original audiences once would have done, is a great way to engage with the story in a new way and breathe new life into it.
Simon Sarris’ recent article, Audiobooks Are Books and They’re Also Practice, also points out the benefit that audiobooks help teach you to listen well. “Listening is a skill. One you should take seriously and one that might have atrophied in recent times. I can’t prove this change, though I think we can infer it a little from changes in media — for instance movie scenes, cuts, and dialogue have all been shortened over the decades. Generally the pacing of nearly all media has quickened. Possibly the delivery of “more, faster” is the result of a too-great respect for novelty as an artistic flourish. I think these changes, and maybe others I can’t see, affect how people choose to make conversation in their daily lives, and make it shorter and faster too.”
He goes on to recommend a few favorite audiobooks, and in the comments many others have chimed in as well. If you’re looking for a good place to start with audiobooks, or a new recommendation, check out Sarris’ excellent article! Today there are many ways to easily access audiobooks, including Audible, Libro.fm, Hoopla, and Libby. The last two are free through your library, and I can’t recommend checking them out enough!