On Hearding Books

A few years ago I had a week of vacation heading into Thanksgiving. The spouse still had work and I didn’t have anything special going on, so I decided to get away. I grew up going to a camp in the Pike National Forest on the back of Pike’s Peak, plus my family took a number of vacations in that area. My dad, brother, and I have hiked the Barr Trail from Manitou Springs (next to Colorado Springs) up to the top twice. So it’s a nostalgic area for me, and I’m always drawn to visit again. I tried taking my wife one time and she had horrible altitude sickness, so she’s not real keen on ever going back. So I made a reservation with a cabin in the area, loaded up one of our dogs, and headed out for four days of solo hiking. A snowstorm blew in on the afternoon of the first day before I could become acclimatized enough to do anything ambitious, plus it killed the car for a couple of days which meant I had to explore the cabin area instead of the old trails I remembered. Still, it was a good trip and I’d do it again sometime.

What this is leading up to, though, is that I listened to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods on that trip. Our car stereo only had a CD player and the audio was only available to me on tape, so I had to use a little walkman and headphones. Even with fresh batteries, the player was too weak to wind the tapes at full speed, so I heard the novel slightly distorted. Nevertheless, it was a great listen and the book ranks as one of my favorites.

I bring all of this up because Stephen King wrote a recent column for Entertainment Weekly about audiobooks, and he ranks American Gods as the tenth best audiobook he’s ever listened to (click for the entire list). Like King, I love audiobooks. Not all books are written for the ear, but those that are, when read by a good reader, are an amazing experience. I couldn't decide if it was the writing or the reader, but a lousy listening experience recenty led me to give up on The Witch's Boy; an excellent reader moved The Minister's Daughter to the top of my favorites list. And listening to audiobooks is reading. I helped my wife write a grant to get some for her English classroom, and there is plenty of research to show that listening to books improves reading ability. Some excerpts from King:

Some critics — the always tiresome Harold Bloom among them — claim that listening to audiobooks isn't reading. I couldn't disagree more. In some ways, audio perfects reading. . . .

. . . when these things are good, they are really good. A Charles Dickens novel read by the late David Case is something you can almost bathe in. A suspense novel is more suspenseful — especially in the hands of a good reader — because your eye can't jump ahead and see what happens next. When I heard Kathy Bates reading The Silence of the Lambs (an abridgment, alas), I was driving at night and had to shut off the CD player, even though I knew how the story went. It was her voice, so low and intimate and somehow knowing. It was flat creeping me out.

I knew even better how the short story "1408" went, because I not only wrote it, I recorded it. Still, I wasn't prepared for the scream of trumpets the director had added at the very end of the story. My pulse rate spiked and I tore the headphones off my ears. That was a true sting.

There's this, too: Audio is merciless. It exposes every bad sentence, half-baked metaphor, and lousy word choice. (Listen to a Tom Clancy novel on CD, and you will never, ever read another. You'll never be able to look at another one without gibbering.) I can't remember ever reading a piece of work and wondering how it would look up on the silver screen, but I always wonder how it will sound. Because, all apologies to Mr. Bloom, the spoken word is the acid test. They don't call it storytelling for nothing.