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Confessions of an Audiobook Addict - The New Yorker   

As a compulsive reader of physical books, I tend to cue up an audiobook not so much as a sonic counterpart to print but as a portable verbal atmosphere to accompany some errand or everyday hustle. I don’t drive and haven’t had a valid driver’s license in twenty years, so I never have the opportunity to tackle, say, all of “Beowulf” or “Don Quixote” during a regular commute. But I’ve taken in “The Waste Land” while waiting in line at the post office, listened to Richard Feynman explain electromagnetism on the 7 train out to Citi Field, heard Marx anatomize the commodity form while walking trails in Van Cortlandt Park, had Iris Murdoch’s swirling sentences in my earbuds while ordering an everything bagel (lightly toasted). Once at a Key Food in Riverdale, I became so entranced by the mellifluous unctuousness of Jeremy Irons reading “Lolita” that, in my fugue state, the names of the different Triscuit varieties on the shelves were mystically annexed to Humbert Humbert’s monologue: “Ladies and gentleman of the jury, fire-roasted tomato, smoked gouda, hint of sea salt, avocado cilantro and lime.”

Though audiobooks have their origins in recordings made for the blind as early as 1948 (Helen Keller called such books “the most valuable tool for the blind since the development of Braille”), they now form their own media ecosystem, with awards for production and performance (Audies), dedicated online forums for review and appraisal (AudioFile magazine), and publishers’ “beginner’s guides” to cultivating a relationship with audiobooks. The audiobook’s ascent into full-blown aesthetic autonomy came with the arrival of the iPod and its MP3 file format in 2001, and, as of 2023, more than half the U.S. population has listened to an audiobook (in Sweden, they outsell hardcovers). And, although it is tempting to evaluate audiobooks against the benchmark of physical books, they are really an entirely different thing. Of course, you’re not free to casually reread, paragraph reset, glance at the index, flip the book over to scan the insipid blurbs, or all the other desultory nonlinear things we do with books. And the tempo is fixed, though not entirely; you can set the speed at quarter increments, which gives a range of choices, from the soporific lowest setting, .25x, to the caffeinated upper end, at 2x. And audiobooks are not at all the same thing as a podcast. The latter are often messy, warts-and-all conversations, with all the “ums,” “likes,” laughs, and snorts left in, whereas an audiobook is a polished, edited, artificial production.

Exemplary of the audiobook as a production to be consumed the way you would a movie or a playlist are the hugely popular celebrity autobiographies read by the author. Springsteen’s memoir, “Born to Run,” kicks off with the tag riff of the titular tune, and then Bruce comes in reading like one of the gas-station sages in his songs. His occasional podcasting partner Barack Obama reads his own book “A Promised Land” (a version of the title of a Springsteen tune, incidentally) in those pleasantly elongated Chicago diphthongs that we know so well and that make him sound eternally sanguine. You could start a religion around David Lynch reading his book “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.” Lynch’s voice oscillates between chipper Howdy Doody squareness and disarmingly strange metaphysical injunctions, as when he advises the listener to avoid the “Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity,” urging us instead to “dive within.” (also, each chapter begins with an ominous “Eraserhead”-ish whoosh). One from this genre that I particularly like is “I’m Keith Hernandez” read by Keith Hernandez, a member of the great Mets lineup that won the 1986 World Series. I hear Keith on cable TV two or three times a week during baseball season, so I get my fix in the offseason by listening to him tell stories about getting into scrapes with drunk umpires in the minor-leagues, on up to becoming an eleven-time gold-glove winner, and his appearances as himself on a couple episodes of “Seinfeld” (not to mention the Ph.D.-level insights about the science of hitting along the way).

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