perfidy

The NY Times has an article about the new vogue for audiobooks, at least among denizens of greater New York City. I shouldn't be so glib: it is true that as the number of Americans who read books regularly declines, the number who listen to them has been rising.

The Times takes note of the discussion simmering between authors and "readers" (for what else can we call people who regularly listen to the printed word in leiu of reading it but "readers," any note of condescention detected being not entirely accidental?) as to what types of books are most appropriate for listening, and what kind of prose works best (they note that D.H. Lawrence makes for particularly dull listening). People listen to books while commuting, while exercising, and while walking the dog, though one user testifies that short stories work best for dog-walking since there's less to miss - a spectacularly stupid thing to say. A good short story packs an entire universe into five hundred words, meaning that if you look up to pull your dog off the mailman's leg, you've arguably missed more than if Dean Koontz were squirting his gore-soaked hackery straight into your ear. But I digress.

Although I have enjoyed a book on tape (namely Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester, read by the author), I just don't know if reading aloud is always the best way to absorb a book. In high school my advanced English class read aloud each day, and it quickly became apparent which authors were bearable aloud and which were not. Hemingway: yes. Tolstoy: not so much.

I think the main concern is that many writers don't write with auditory concerns in mind. That is, some authors write to be heard, and some authors write to be read. The latter write so that readers can roll the succession of words around their mind, savoring the singular texture and shape of each phrase with little regard for how difficult it might be to say. Take the foregoing sentence: if I were writing that to read out loud, I would never have used "savoring the singular texture," which sounds a little fey and precious but feels in the mind-- to me at least-- pleasingly crinkly. I tend to craft sentences so they have rhythm, a flow of tension and release on which I can hang the exact words I need to use. Unfortunately, that means out loud I read like a moron. It's that way for many authors. I could listen to Donald Hall's poetry all day long but I think I'd rather sit down with Pynchon, thank you very much. Unlike me, both Hall and Pynchon are major contemporary writers, but only one of them works aloud.

Many readers mentally sound out what their eye scans as they read it. Personally, I'm one of those readers and I write for them. It's much easier to think how "coruscating" sounds than to actually stumble over it with your tongue, and if I want that ocean to be "coruscating" rather than "glinting" "glimmering" "shimmering" or "shining," then that is what I will write. And when the book on tape comes out, that coruscating ocean will sound positively idiotic. Writing for reading aloud requires exactly the same attention to precise shading that writing for reading quietly does, but the rules are different and largely incompatible. A speechwriter isn't necessarily a novelist. I'm not going to denigrate people for absorbing books by whatever means they can, but I am going to stand athwart history with a dictionary and a reading lamp, shouting "shut up!!"