Maggie Gram has an interesting perspective on listening to audio books. She started listening to them while she was still a grad student, but she faced hesitation about her avocation to friends and strangers. Is it considered lazy to listen to books? What does an audio book have that a printed book doesn’t? When is an audio book arguably (or definitely) better than the printed book? These are some of the questions Maggie tackles in her piece for N+1 Magazine.

Some highlights follow. First–this is something I didn’t know–the advent of listening to audio books in the United States was perhaps most triggered by those coming from the War visually impaired and/or blind:

Because so many soldiers coming home from the First World War had been blinded by chlorine gas and mustard gas, non-congenital blindness suddenly became much more common in the United States. Congress responded to its newly blind constituents by putting aside some money for books in Braille. But Braille is not for everyone; it’s very hard to learn, and in the 1930s only one in four blind adults could read it. In 1935 the Works Project Administration began a project producing a special new phonograph machine called the Talking Book. The project operated out of a converted loft on Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue, and at its height it employed three hundred previously unemployed people. A sign at the head of the room said “Every man working here is doing his part to make the blind of the country happier.” By the first months of 1937, ten thousand blind Americans were listening to WPA audio books.

I like this thought about audio books being kitsch:

So maybe we think audio books are kitsch. Maybe we like books to be an exclusive property; maybe audio books both threaten our eliteness and crowd our avant-garde. But do we really think this way anymore? The people who read this magazine, and the people with whom I go to graduate school, are not people who hate kitsch. We read Us Weekly on the beach. We think it’s funny to talk about how many KFCDouble-Downs we are going to eat, and we also think it’s funny to eat them. We Gchat our friends incessantly asking whether they have watched the YouTube video we sent six minutes ago with the baby monkey wrestling the baby dog. We listen to Lady Gaga and Jay-Z and that Beyoncé song written by The-Dream, and we like them all both because they sound really good and because they marry kitsch to the avant-garde—because they are both art about art and art about mass-produced art, art about universally accessible art, the imitation of imitating-under-capitalism. Loving kitsch makes us feel deviant, but we know it is more likely to increase our social capital than to damage it. Kitsch is sexy. We are aficionados of the avant-garde, but kitsch is also our game. 

As for me: I’ve tried listening to audio books, only to give up time and time again. I haven’t found one that has captured my attention enough to keep going. I am not a fast reader, but the slow pace of narrators of audio books is something that drives me crazy… For now, I am sticking to reading rather than listening.

What is your experience with audio books?