When a culture falls prey to an obsession with “reading challenges” and daily word count goals, it is all too easy to become inured to the shoddiness of the texts we’ve chosen and more difficult to object to the offensive quality of many of the books on offer.The emergence of eBooks on a commercial scale can be traced back to the 1970s when Michael S. This has always been the case (surely there were some flops even among those bardic epics of yore), though it’s a truth that grows more elusive when we are led to believe that reading is not supposed to be enjoyable. The vast majority of them are uninspired, unconvincing, and poorly written. But it seems to me that there exists a more obvious explanation for why reading often feels so dull: Most books are very bad. Anxieties about post-literacy tend to focus obsessively on the question of medium, and audiobooks are often hailed as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, alongside social media, visual entertainment, and the decline in attention spans. Even your desire to “read more” contains a whiff of compulsion, suggesting that many books you’ve encountered have failed to live up to their transcendent potential. If you’re like most people I know, you probably find it difficult to recall the last time a book-regardless of how you consumed it-succeeded in altering your consciousness.
#Are audio books better than reading free#
Most of us were read to by adults before we learned to read ourselves, and listening to audiobooks recalls the distinctive delight of being told a story: the rhythms of the prose made incarnate in a human voice the dialog animated through the performance of a skillful reader the ease with which our eyes, liberated from the page, are free to roam around the bedroom (or the aerobics room, or the landscape beyond the car windshield) so as to better imagine the actions of the narrative playing out.
I’d be willing to bet, Easy Listening, that your earliest experiences with the joy of literature were aural. Even the obsession with retention assumes that the purpose of reading is to absorb knowledge or nuggets of trivia that one can use to demonstrate cultural literacy or being “well read.” What all of this obscures is the possibility that books might be a source of intrinsic pleasure, an end in themselves. Many people who aspire to read more are motivated by the promise that doing so will prevent cognitive decline, improve brain connectivity, or increase emotional intelligence. The larger problem, however, is in viewing books as a means to some other end. According to this rather tenuous logic, listening to audiobooks is inferior precisely because it is easier-because it lacks the element of suffering that is incontrovertible evidence of accomplishment, the same way soreness is proof of a real workout.
(As easy as it is to multitask with audiobooks, the form does make it harder to return, after a spell of distraction, to the passage where your mind started to wander.) Others insist that audiobooks eliminate the reader’s responsibility to interpret things like irony, tone, and inflection, given that the person recording does the work of conveying emotion. Some cite studies that have shown people who listen to books retain less than those who read them, which is bound up with how tempting it is to do other things while listening. While some disciples of this culture are quick to dismiss audiobooks as a shortcut, they cannot seem to agree on why, exactly, listening is an inferior form of engagement.
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