Is Listening to Audiobooks Cheating at Reading?

Dear Kira,

I can't believe it's been two years since either of us has written anything on this blog. I'd like to apologize for taking so long to respond to you; apparently several new jobs, moving out of state and then back to Pennsylvania, and living in four different apartments over the past two years really kept me busy.

First of all, I'd like to address the question you posed in your last post: How can we be astute and critical readers of texts while also enjoying the text (or film or whatever) in the spirit in which it was offered. You point out, rightly so, that many texts that are intended to be cute or fun are deeply problematic and reinforce problematic ideas.

Twilight--the book everyone loves to hate--is a case and point. It has been criticized for (among other things) seeming to suggest that Bella needs to be in a romantic relationship to be happy and for normalizing a deeply unhealthy relationship. However, 13 year-old me loved Twilight, and I was perfectly aware that Bella was a flawed character that behaved stupidly. So, was I wrong to like Twilight at the time? Embarrassing as it is to admit that I read and enjoyed Twilight, I have to say that I don't think I was wrong to enjoy it. While I was reading the Twilight series, I was also discovering and reading books like Ivanhoe, Vanity Fair, Emma, and Pride and Prejudice. My point is that it's okay to indulge in guilty pleasure books like Twilight, but it's important to recognize that those books to have limitations and to balance them out with more thoughtful works.

That being said, I think it's time to move on to a new topic: Audiobooks.

I have been SUPER into audiobooks for about two years, and, in that time, I've probably listened to at least 100 audiobooks.

If you're a busy person in the world (as most of us are), it's really hard to find the time to pick up a physical book, sit down and actually read it. The problem is that you can't really do much of anything else while you're reading. On the other hand, you can do almost anything while listening to an audiobook. I listen to audiobooks while I do my makeup, prepare food, fold my laundry, and clean my apartment. It makes reading incredibly efficient.

In fact, this year I set myself the ambitious goal of reading 125 books, and probably 80% of that number is going to be made up of audiobooks. This is because, as I said, audiobooks are an efficient way to read. It's very easy to sit down and listen to someone read a book to you while you do something else. A ten hour audiobook usually takes me no more than three days to finish, which is really fast turn around time for reading a book.

So audiobooks are great because they're quick and easy and make reading more accessible to busy people, but do audiobooks make reading too easy? Sometimes, when I'm recording reading my second or third book of the week on my Goodreads account, I feel a little guilty, as if I'm taking credit for something I didn't do.

Listening to a book is passive; when you listen to a book, you're along the for the ride. Physically picking up a book and reading it is another story. A physical book demands your attention while you're reading it. You can't tune out while reading; you have to be actively engaged in the process. Although I love audiobooks, I do feel that you get far more out of reading a physical book. Reading a book gives you an intimate understanding of the text that listening to it can't replicate.

For example, while you're listening to a book, it's very easy to glide past a confusing passage or a point that you don't fully understand. Reading a physical book challenges you to revisit the passage and read it again and again until you feel you understand it.

For  example, while I was listening to the audiobook of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, I kept thinking to myself "man, this is really interesting, I have to read this book" (even though I was "reading" the book at that moment). I instinctively felt that I needed to have the words in front of my face to really understand the book. To me, the audiobook was a teaser version, allowing me to preview the text without having a chance to examine the book in detail.

Also, physically reading a book represents a huge investment of time and mental energy. So, in some ways, it is a bigger accomplishment to finish reading a book than it is to finish listening to an audiobook. You could say that listening to audiobooks is lazy reading, and I have often thought that myself.

So, the answer is clear, right? Listening to an audiobook is not as good as reading an actual book.

I don't think that's the case either. An audiobook is a performance, and listening a performative version of a text often causes you to interpret a book differently than you might have if you read it to yourself. It's also worthwhile to remember that, while reading books might be the traditional way of consuming texts now, it wasn't always so.

For example, I read and then listened to a book called Blood and Beauty: The Borgias. I liked both versions a lot, but I thought the physical book was slow going and sometimes a little boring. On the other hand, the narrator of the audiobook brought a sense of urgency to the plot and an emotional depth that I didn't pick up on when reading it.

Physical books are a relatively new development in the course of human history, and average people have had only had easy access to books for even less time. For most of human history, ideas and stories were conveyed verbally. Reciting stories out loud is a time-honored human tradition, and audiobooks can be seen as just a newer version of this age-old practice. You could argue that the human brain is naturally far better attuned to picking up information from spoken words as opposed to random scribbles on pieces of paper. After all, it's tremendously difficult to teach a child to read, while most children pick  naturally and unconsciously pick up the knack of turning noises into words and words into meaning.

So, what do you think? Is listening to audiobooks cheating? Is listening the same thing as reading? Or, is reading inherently different? Which do you prefer?

Until next time,
Maria