| From
the May/June 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Do You Hear What I Hear?
 here’s
one quote I’m particularly enjoying in Pamela
Varley’s article about audiobooks, beginning on page 251
of this issue. Says a mother of her daughter’s enthusiasm
for audiobooks, “Is this as good as reading, or as bad as
watching TV?” Such pithy phrasing! And with so much to parse,
not least the Manichaean dichotomy implied between selected media.
In editing Varley’s article, I had to overcome
— or at least confront — my own hasty rejection of books
on tape. They go so slowly, I would groan, advertising
at once my own speedy reading skills and my disdain for a format
I secretly dismissed as easy, akin, yes, to watching TV. But now
I think it’s a case of the right book in the right format
finding the right reader at the right time, for as my test case
I listened to all nine hours of Ha Jin’s Waiting
(Brilliance Audio) with complete enthrallment. Narrator Dick Hill
drew me completely into a story that, on the page, might have appeared
too subdued for my reading temperament. I was grateful for the way
the book seemed to talk me into itself; my dog was grateful for
the lengthy walks my listening encouraged. What was most different
from reading was the degree of concentration the audiobook demanded
and rewarded. It upped the ante on distraction: my attention momentarily
diverted by a passing car or a stray thought, I would miss a sentence
or two and be able to make increasingly little sense of the ones
that followed. We’re used to handling this with print, simply
going back to the beginning of the page or paragraph to start again.
But finding the rewind button and spooling back just far enough
was so much work that instead I tried very hard to keep myself on
task.
As Varley points out, the virtue of the format
is its insistence on relating every word the author put between
the covers, but I’d have to say that this is where the audiobook
finds its limits as well. Not every sentence gives up its meaning
the first time you read it, and sometimes you don’t know to
read it twice until you are a page or more beyond it. Yet the tape
or disc player grinds inexorably on, insisting on a linear version
of the book. “A word after a word after a word is power,”
Margaret Atwood famously declared, but sometimes you need to go
back and forth a bit to reap their richest meaning.
I can’t say whether audiobooks are as good
as reading or as bad as watching TV. Every reader knows that it
is completely possible to use reading as a way to waste time that
could have been more profitably spent watching something good on
TV. But that question prompts another: are audiobooks more like
books or more like TV? With their now-you-hear-it, now-it’s-gone
resemblance to the continuous action of video or film — or
music — audiobooks are at least as much performance as they
are literature. Even the most scrupulously faithful audiobook presents
a particular take on the text, and not simply by the vocal demeanor
of its narrator but by its reel-to-reel (or bit by bit) insistence.
The question for librarians and teachers working
with young people is this: do we select and promote audiobooks because
they are books, are like books, or promote
books; or do we welcome them on their own terms? Librarians now
select audiobooks routinely, but I suspect this is largely due to
these tapes’ dependence on (and, as we see it, promotion of)
print media. But increasingly sophisticated and wide-ranging applications
of digital media mean that we won’t always be able to measure
by the book. What are we going to do with narrative that is made
explicitly for headphones? Or interactive stories where the distinction
between author and reader is even trickier than we’ve always
suspected? Just how expansive are we prepared to get in our definition
of the Word? Our allegiance to it is in for interesting times.
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