The Written Word, Heard
Listening to audiobooks is not the same as reading. Here's why that matters – and why it doesn't.
In his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens describes himself as a man who “kept two sets of books”, and his speaking life was evidence of this. By night, he was “Hitch”: mover and shaker with policy makers, literati lush, excoriator of religious reasoning (“Rather an oxymoron,” you can imagine him quipping in his Oxfordian drawl). By day, he was professor Hitchens, teaching the seemingly unteachable: how to write as well as he could speak. In a piece for Vanity Fair, he wrote:
“To my writing classes I used to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: ‘How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?’ That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. […] If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.”
Hitchens’ voice was in many ways his identity, and I came to his work not through his writing but through the still-efflorescent back catalogue of his debates on YouTube. I cannot think of him without hearing his voice – his droll intonation, on being asked to stand at the podium to deliver a rebuttal, “Well, if I can’t be erect, I might as well be upright”; the self-ironizing way he’d mention his latest book and add, “Available at fine bookstores everywhere”; the way he could pirouette from wry humour to moral indignation like a verbal ballerina.
Perhaps this is why Hitch-22 is the only book I’ve listened to as an audiobook. It’s read by the author, so listening perfectly matches the experience I have when reading it. Hitchens’ voice resonates off the page, which is why this is the only book I’ve felt to be secondary to the spoken version. I suppose I’ve also done some cognitive ventriloquism in assuming Hitch would take no offence at my hearing, rather than reading, his words. This is an exceedingly rare example of a book that seems to exist as a script for the voice – his voice – to follow.
So, Hitch-22 is the only literary book I’ve ever listened to in full, though I’ve dabbled in non-fiction audiobooks here and there. This is a fact I should present plainly here at the outset: I am not an audiobook aficionado. Something in me instinctively turns away from Audible and Spotify and the ever-expanding realm of spoken-word versions of what were once physical pages inked with words.
The first audiobooks came from the 1930’s “Talking Books Program”, a joint venture by the American Foundation for the Blind and the Library of Congress. Only the emotionally blind would fail to see why Helen Keller once described audiobooks as “the most valuable tool for the blind since the development of Braille”. We can, with similar empathy, expand the circle of those who benefit from audiobooks to include the severely dyslexic, people with impaired literacy, and people like stay-at-home parents, paramedics, or care home staff who would otherwise lack the time and energy for a physical book. Frankly, I’m not interested in gatekeeping who counts as “deserving” of audiobooks. If you wouldn’t engage with literature without audiobooks, you’ll get no berating from me.
What does interest me is why I find it so irksome that some count listening to an audiobook as reading. Is this mere snobbery on my part, or does it hint at something worth thinking more deeply about? I can’t entirely rule out the first, but I’m going to run with the second possibility for a few more paragraphs.
Obviously, listening to audiobooks isn’t the same thing as reading. The verbs give it away. Listening and reading are distinct categories, just like a dancer isn’t doing dentistry. So what? You might make an unfructuous case for the utility of recognising distinct categories, but once we’ve acknowledged that audiobooks and books, reading and listening, are separate things, where does that leave us? A carpenter may not be a plumber, but that doesn’t imply any hierarchy of value or quality. Both are useful at different times.
There are plenty of articles that expound on the neuroscientific and social benefits of reading, some of which are absent in audiobooks, many of which can be gained through reading or listening. But I’m not here to argue for one over the other. Instead, I want to champion the audiobook as an artform so far not as developed as it might be, something as related to and yet distinct from literature as cinema. I adore cinematic adaptations of novels, when done well. And the ways in which a film adaptation can be done well are similar to how audiobooks could be done well. Maybe we should even start thinking of audiobooks as adaptations, rather than merely books spoken out loud.
An unimaginative (and, sadly, common) criticism of film adaptations is that they deviate “too far” from the book. I’ve never understood this criticism – if you’re that faithfully monogamous to the novel, why would you want it as a film at all? If, on the other hand, you practice a kind of critical polyamory, then you find joy in the opening up of the novel to new interpretations. Of course, it’s vital to understand that this is just one of many ways to read the story, and that another’s interpretation shouldn’t stand in for your own. Granted that, I love discovering something new in an old favourite. For me, an adaptation is a failure when it adheres too closely to the source material and thus doesn’t justify its own existence. I can’t stand a film adaptation that exists only to excuse its audience from reading the book.
I’d be more interested in audiobooks if they offered that sense of interpretation, rather than mere reverse transcription. I want to hear how a narrator, or the director of an audiobook (there are whole careers waiting to open up here), interprets a story. Just as I want cinema to do with a book what only cinema can, I want audiobooks to do with them what only audio can. Zadie Smith performed the audiobook of her own novel The Fraud, and she had a vocal coach teach her a Scottish accent so she could “do” the voices of characters. Imagine having whole casts for the characters, and a distinct voice for the narrator. Use sound effects, music, whatever innovations you can dream up to turn the novel into something new and exciting.
So much for what audiobooks could be doing better; there is, however, a case remaining to be made for how we could do better for audiobooks. We could stop consuming them passively. Audiobooks are incessantly praised for their versatility, that you can listen to them while walking the dog, washing the dishes, or pretending to do office work. In this way, audiobooks perpetuate the fallacious belief that humans are capable of dual processing. We are not. When we think we’re multitasking, we are actually doing several things in quick succession, never at once, and we’re doing each of them far less well than we would if we focused. As Daniel T. Willingham says in a piece on audiobooks for The New York Times, “If we multitask, we’ll get gist, not subtleties.”
It’s important to recognise the varying degrees of quality that can be wrung out of the manner in which we read or listen to books. We need a better culture of taking in audiobooks – but this is a problem of all the arts. If you put on a movie while scrolling through social media, or if you “watched” Lawrence of Arabia for the first time on your phone (a real-life example, from Ted Sarandos of Netflix, that will never cease to turn my stomach), then – no apologies – I don’t think you watched that film. I side with David Lynch when he said, “It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on a fucking telephone.”
The problem comes down to the cheapening of literature, whether spoken aloud or written down. My scepticism of audiobooks isn’t because I doubt that they have value, but because audiobooks aren’t allowed to give as fully of their value as they might. If you’re happy just filling the aural space in your life with a good story you mostly hear while doing housework, absolutely fine. But if you want more, if you crave depth, if you’re excited by lifting the layers of literature, you’d do well by reading, and listening, a little more carefully.
Further Reading:
• “Unspoken Truths”, in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens (2011)
• “Is Listening to a Book the Same Thing as Reading It?”, in The New York Times, Daniel T. Willingham (2018)