3 ARTICLES ABOUT AUDIOBOOKS
The Voice / The New York Times Book Review
My audiobook listening takes place during my morning exercise, which means I spend a good seven hours a week listening to books — far more of them, in fact, than I read in print these days. If you’d encountered me on the street recently, you might have seen me trotting along, laughing aloud to David Sedaris’s “Barrel Fever” or Tina Fey’s “Bossypants,” or crying — yes, real tears and grimaces, I have to admit — to the ending of “The Mill on the Floss.” My neighbors either don’t notice or are too kind to mention my seeming emotional instability.
The Pleasures of Being Read To / New Yorker’s Page-Turner
Harold Bloom, the literary critic, once expressed doubt about the audiobook. “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” he told the Times. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” While this is perhaps true for serious literary criticism, it’s manifestly not true when it comes to experiencing a book purely for the pleasure of its characters, setting, dialogue, drama, and the Scheherazadean impulse to know what happens next—which, all apologies to Bloom, is why most people pick up a book in the first place. Homer, after all, was an oral storyteller, as were all “literary artists” who came before him, back to when storytelling, around the primal campfire, would have been invented—grounds for the argument that our brains were first (and thus best?) adapted to absorb long, complex fictions by ear, rather than by eye.
Futurama’s David X. Cohen on Audiobooks / AdWeek
What occupies your mind in the car?
My big thing now is books on tape—actually books on download—because I have this long commute like everybody in L.A., and I was wasting it listening to the five-minute news cycle. So suddenly, I actually listen to books on tape coming and going. If there’s one key change in my information diet, it’s audio books.
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