@Sheamus

The Trouble With Audio Books

Mon, 17 May 2010 13:18:00 -0700

For a while now, I’ve been trying to get into audio books.

Forget the iPad – this is the very cutting edge of technology. The thing is, I love to read, but simply cannot find enough time. Like an addict, I find myself sneaking pages thanks to the Kindle app on my iPhone – usually when I have to visit the bathroom, or endure yet another British queue. Or both. Otherwise, the best I can usually manage is a pathetic 15-20 minutes when I go to bed. That last one or two pages before sleep? Forget about it.

Some clarification – I read thousands of words per day. On Wikipedia. Go ahead – ask me anything about Iron Man or drip irrigation. My issue is with reading books, very much in the old-school sense of that word. Also, the awful snob inside of me feels it’s very important to tell you that I very rarely read (or listen to) novels. I hate to use the word ‘faction’, but that’s essentially where I’m at. Historical works, biographies, social science, marketing texts – that’s me.

So, I figured audio books are the way forward. With audio books, I could, I assumed, read (in a sense) whilst doing other things. Like working, or Twitter, or Wikipedia. Yeah, I figured I could listen to books whilst browsing through Wikipedia, riding a unicycle, learning another language, and doing that thing where you pat your head and rub your stomach in a circle, all at the same time.

Except I can’t. Oh, don’t get me wrong – all that other stuff is a piece of cake. It’s the audio books themselves that are giving me fits.

Here’s my dilemma – I’m a drifter. My mind likes to race away here, there and everywhere, and the problem with audio books is that they make it easy for you to think about other things. That is, other things apart from the book.

It’s their fault. They make you do this. The narrator (in my case, this is always the author, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay money to listen to anybody else) spins a good yarn that is both well-conceived and delivered. It might be somebody like Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell – they’ll say something clever and insightful, and it will send me away to a magical place.

Before you know it, ten minutes have passed and I have absolutely no idea what the hell they’re talking about.

Sure, this happens with proper books, too. You’re reading for a little while and then you notice that two obviously very important characters are engaged in some pointed dialogue and you don’t know anything about either of them. So you flick back a couple of pages, find some text you do recognise, and start over. Sometimes it’s just the one paragraph that leaves you in a kind of literary Groundhog Day, forcing you to read it again and again until you give up completely, still none the wiser as to what is actually going on.

That’s fine. That’s how it’s meant to be. But in audio books, this vacuum of incomprehension is troublesome. Yes, you can rewind, but how far? You have absolutely no idea how long you haven’t actually been listening. You resort to jumping back to random points, straining for recognition. You find something that sounds vaguely familiar and give it a go – thirty seconds later, you realise that you know all of this (thank you very much) and now you’re really up against it, stymied in the digital media hell that is somewhere between too far, and not far enough. It’s familiar ground, albeit one that was previously reserved for DVDs that have been ejected accidentally.

So, you end up making half an effort, and then just kind of plod on with it, hoping that you’ll suddenly make sense of a name or a topic. You tell yourself to focus – come on, this is easy – and this is what you do… for a little while.

Then, another ten minutes have passed, and you have absolutely no idea what the hell they’ve been talking about.

Repeat.

The good news? Listening to audio books in this method (let’s call it casual reading) allows you to get through at least one a day. For example, earlier this afternoon I bombed through Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in about three hours flat. And it was so good, I plan to read it again tomorrow.

And perhaps the next day. Maybe then all those black spots will have gone away.

@Sheamus

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