Reading vs. Audiobooks

First off, welcome back! It's been awhile. Well, it's been five years since my last post. My Wordpress Blogetary blog kept getting bombarded and attacked by viruses, etc. So, I took it down. Then, Teddy died. I adopted two new kittens, and after a while, the pandemic happened, and I just plain forgot about this dear old Blogger blog that I had set up years ago. 

Today, I was going through job posts, looking over my Etsy shop wondering what I could do to sell items, or even sell books, or get more freelance work or SOMETHING. And I realized that back in 2008 when I was in this situation, I had a blog (Blogetary, of course) where I posted book reviews, opinions on proofreading, and all sorts of other ideas as a way to get myself "out there." So, while blogs are considered "old school" these days, there are people who still happen by them occasionally. I decided to pull this particular blog out of storage, dust it off, and see what I could do with it. I've renamed it Putt Putt Productions, the name of my freelance business. Slow and steady wins the race is my motto, cuz you have to keep going, even if slowly, if you're going to get anywhere. So, here we are. 

Below is my "cat tax," as friends call it, or photos of the two felines currently in residence at Chez Olivier as a bribe for reading this post. Here are Pippin and Dakota. Thank you for reading thus far, and read on for the current events at Putt Putt Productions.

Today, I'm going to discuss reading vs. audiobooks. 

For most of my life, I have not been a fan of audiobooks. It just wasn't my thing.

Now, I have a whole passel of friends who, at this point, would jump up and try to tell me about all the different pod casts out there that they just LOVE to listen to. And I would nod and smile and make note of the programs and promptly forget the names of them. Or listen to one program and not get into it and promptly forget about it again. And when articles come online that are video vs. written, I'm the one who would rather read the article than watch the video. The video just annoys me, while I can skim the article to get to the meat of what I want to find out. One friend of mine has pointed out to me in the past that I'm a visual person at heart. I need to see the thing. Read the thing. For it to get into my brainpan.

Now, I have always liked listening to the radio, music, and sometimes radio programs, too, or stories, but especially NPR or public radio programs. The public radio programs made me feel smart, to know what was going on. But, I quit somewhere along the line for two reasons. One was that I realized that the programs and reporters all had the same cadences and sound cues when discussing or introducing a topic, which irritated me. I wanted someone to do something different. Why did it always need to be the same? (Okay, now that I've worked for a newspaper I get that it's a "style" thing. But note, that I no longer work for that newspaper anymore because one of the things that drove me nuts was that we could never be different. If you know me, you know how much that irks me.) The second reason (going back to the radio programs) that I quit listening, was that they were all getting too damn depressing. Waking up to hearing about droughts, wars, famines, and presidents who don't care about the common person just wasn't my idea of a way to start the day.

Anyway, during the pandemic, EVERYTHING was too depressing. It didn't matter if you were listening to it or watching it or reading it, it was all bad. (To be honest, it's still pretty bad if you're paying attention. We've just adjusted our norm.) Like everyone else, I was bingeing on lots of streaming movies and TV to keep the world at bay. I quit writing creatively. And for some reason I wasn't able to concentrate my eyes on a page for very long to read a story. I had to read for work, of course, but even that became hard to do, so it's no wonder that reading for pleasure somehow dropped off the radar as well. And that's when I decided to look into audiobooks. I wanted something that I could do, that my brain could hang onto, while I did something else useful, like dishes, or crochet. I didn't want to just sit in front of a screen all day. I wanted to do something, but I wanted to be accompanied by stories. 

Stories are my brain food. While some people like learning by reading articles or hearing lectures. I like learning through stories. The lectures and articles are fine, and not saying I don't dabble, occasionally. And when I was a kid there were some biographies that I read repeatedly, but they were written for kids and some aspects were probably fictionalized.

I have a brain made for fiction. That's just the way it is.

Storytelling, fiction, is like the coal or the steam or the battery or the gas that keeps me going. I need that, but watching TV and movies or sitting and reading a book all day doesn't get the laundry done. So, in short (too late!) I turned to audiobooks to get my storytelling fix while trying to be productive.

I began with books I had already read as a way of dipping my toe in, and then checked them out via Libby, which is your local public library's way of handling electronic media. 

Audiobooks are usually spendy. The publishing company has hired a producer and narrator/actor and has bought or rented equipment to bring this audiobook to the public. So, that makes sense. But, using your local library, they're free!

I feel like I fell in love with the written word, or storytelling, all over again. I've learned a lot in exploring both books I have already read and those I haven't. Some of the books, the Narnia books, for example, were each read by different famous British actors (the Brits know how to do verbal storytelling). Other books are read by the author, which I always like. Neil Gaiman is the best at this. He knows how to read a good story. Some of the audiobooks available are actual radio presentations that were on BBC radio. And there are some narrators out there that are famous in the audiobook world and are the introducers, or presenters, if you will, for the narrators of new works. George Guidall, who narrates "The Cat Who" books is one of these. He's got a fantastic reading voice. Sometimes book series, such as the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher or the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear, or the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series by Vicki Delany, will have changed out their regular narrator for another one, for various reasons.

Something to remember about storytelling is that it was originally the bard's art, an oral art. Telling fables, myths, family legends, etc., was something that everyone participated in at night after dinner or supper or what-have-you, around the fire. This was how history was originally passed down over the ages, and why our current TV pastime is still so popular. Our inner selves remember the times when we gathered around the hearth to hear tales of daring do. We just happen to have those oral tales now accompanied by moving pictures.

A large part of the enjoyment of audiobooks has to do with the narrator (those of you who are bards would nod in concurrence). If the narrator is bad, the enjoyment is greatly diminished. And I admit that there are some average books that I gave up on when the narrator was bad. There was a book narrated by a famous actress that I just couldn't finish. And when I noticed she had narrated some other favorite books, I knew to skip those particular books and saw with relief that there were other versions that had been read by a different narrator that I listened to instead. It doesn't matter if someone is a famous actor, they're not always the best storyteller or reader. James Marsden, who narrates the Harry Dresden files, is fantastic. But sometimes, you I can't get past the cadence or the mispronunciation or whatever it is that is annoying. I mean, you can adjust the speed on audiobooks and I think that helps sometimes, if you're going through an annoying bit. I was reading an early JP Beaumont (by JA Jance) the other day, written in the 80s, and while the narrator was great, the story was really annoying me. Way too curmudgeonly, old-guy-gets-the-pretty-girl, ugh! But I had good memories from the series (way back when, it was the first time I read a book where Seattle was the background character when I was younger) and I wanted to know how the mystery got solved. So I played about half of it on 2x the speed to get through the bits that annoyed me to get to the end. The equivalent of skimming the pages.

But the narrator has to be someone who can voice different characters as well as read a good tale. They have to be multi-talented. With the Winspear/Maisie Dobbs books, for example, the narrator (there were two, they changed after third or fourth book, I think) needed to be able to do all the various English accents, from upper class to working class, as well as American, Canadian, German, and French accents and languages. Recently, I was listening to My Life in France, by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme. That narrator, Kimberly Farr, had to read lists and lists of foods and some conversations in French. That was fantastic.

And sometimes books just don't translate as well into audiobooks as you would want them to. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino is one of my favorite books. While I enjoyed the audiobook, it just didn't resonate with me the same as when I had read it. In the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett there are also some books that don't necessarily translate as well. There's almost too much going on in the story for it to work in an oral landscape.

It's interesting though, how listening to a story is different to reading a story. Reading a story is very internal. You're processing the words visually while imagining the voices and pronunciations and the scenes. Listening can also be internal, I mean, if you're using earphones in the office, for example. But it's more external in nature. Someone else is providing you with the soundtrack of the story. You're no longer making it up on your own. You have to process things differently, too, at least I do. When action scenes happen, for instance. Sometimes I have to rewind the story a few times to get what's happening, where if I were reading it, I'd just soak it all in, like osmosis. 

Currently, I'm listening to Wonder Woman: Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo. I read it a few years ago and always hoped it would be part of a series of more Wonder Woman stories, maybe by different authors. Ah, well.

It's been fun listening to it, almost like another Wonder Woman movie, but not. The narrator, Mozhan Marno, has a good handle on the characters and brings the story to life.

I haven't given up on reading in the normal way. Not at all. But I have learned a lot about the processing of words and stories in my exploration of audiobooks. I've really enjoyed it as another way — perhaps the original way? — of enjoying my stories.

If you haven't gotten into audiobooks, I suggest you try it out. You can access them free via your local library. And unlike TV,  you don't need a screen. Just download the app on your phone and find a good book to listen to while washing the dishes or gardening or doing the mind-numbing work at your desk that you don't want to do, or whatever it is you're doing in the course of your day.