Audio Books

I love the idea of audio books but I don't listen to them that much.  The reason I don't embrace them as much as you would probably expect is because I don't know how much I would take in if I only ever listened to a book and never actually read it myself.  The main appeal of audio books is the fact that someone read it to you which is a lot less effort than reading it yourself.  The trouble with that concept is that you have to sit and listen to what they are saying if you really want to pay attention to it.

I am a multitasker and I can do more than one thing at a time, I frequently write and listen to music at the same time for example.  When you do more than one thing at a time however your attention is divided and you inevitably end up focusing on one thing more than the other.  When I write and listen to music for example it is the subconscious mind that is entertained by the music and it is the conscious mind that writes.  I actually think this is incredibly beneficial as a writer because our own mind can be a distraction and this act preoccupies the subconscious with something to do like giving a child a toy to play with whilst you work on something else.  You just need to ensure that toy isn't going to cause a distraction for your conscious mind and in regard to music that usually means ignoring any music that contains lyrics.  I listen to instrumental music, classical music, trance music, or EDM [Electronic Dance Music] as these are melodious, repetitive, or ambient, and don't provide anything your conscious mind really needs to pay attention to.

Combining music and artistic expression is really something I started to do in High School because our Art teacher had a Radio CD player and she let us listen to music whilst we worked so there was always energy in the room.  The music varied quite a bit and the class was never really quiet.  I took this and extended it to my writing and I found it to be very beneficial for me so I just stuck with it over the years.

When it comes to hearing someone speak however, when there is a narrative, that's a little harder to ignore because the detail distracts you.  It's not really possible to listen to an audio book and follow it whilst doing something else at the same time, at least for me it never was.  Audio books are something that I feel require my focus and attention, that also involves sitting or lying down and doing nothing else whilst listening.  Those last two things are quite hard for me to do.

"What are you thinking?" I ask people from time to time "Nothing" they will often reply - I hate that response with a passion that runs deep to my core.  I do not believe you if you give that response to me, mainly because I have never in my life been able to completely switch off and think of absolutely nothing, from the moment I wake to the moment I fall asleep there is always something I am thinking about, my mind is never completely silent.  Maybe I am not normal and it really is possible to sit and think of absolutely nothing, but I remain intensely sceptical of that claim until I experience it for myself and over thirty years and counting now it's never happened.  When people give this response I assume the truth is quite simply "I don't want to say" rather than the idea that they are sitting staring into space thinking of nothing at all.

The fact that I would have to sit and do nothing to really get into the story is partly why I don't listen to audio books that often.  The ones that I do listen to are of books that I have already read myself.  I prefer to have the physical copy in front of me or at least and ebook to read through and form my own image of it in my mind.

For the sake of balance there are a few positives to audio books that I can at least give to demonstrate that I can see both sides of the argument for them.  Apart from the fact that it's less effort to be read to rather than to read, you do at least gain a better representation of the writing through an audio book.  The reason I say this is because whether the author narrates the book or whether someone else reads it, the author will be involved in the recording process somewhere along the way.  To that end an audio book is perhaps a better representation of things like pronunciation, intonation, accent, and narrative progression.  An audio book establishes a pace through the person that is reading it, which give a greater insight into the artistic vision of the person who wrote the book to begin with - that is of course as long as the author was involved in the recording process, I have had experiences where the person reading it pronounces some things wrong that I know for a fact are pronounced differently because the author themselves have given interviews about the book and they said the correct pronunciation - I'm not going to say which book it was because the arguments that people have over this sort of thing are ridiculous, it's like the hard of soft G of GIF, Yanny Laurel, and THAT dress.

There are also times where the person reading an audio book can end up becoming the canonical voice in your mind of the characters in the book - assuming it was never made into a movie.  This isn't something unique to audio books either, where there are games that are heavily driven by dialogue but no voice acting is used, the people who play these games on YouTube and give voices to the characters can end up being your canonical voice.  JackSepticEye's version of Undertale for example established for me in my mind what I believe many of the characters from the game would sound like, there's also the fact that his play-through was the first time I became aware of the game, if I had played it before seeing his voice acting, I don't know if I would have connected so deeply with the narrative.