Cereal Monogamist

Some Thoughts on Audiobooks

Earlier, I wrote about my reluctance to join the Kindle movement. I now must acknowledge one form of literary technology which has me completely sold: audiobooks.

I got hooked on them last fall, because the audiobook is, without a doubt, the commuter’s best friend. In fact, I listened to sixteen of them last year, including Madame Bovary, which—let’s face it—I probably would not have finished in print.

Our move into Cleveland Heights, and the slicing of my commute down to seven minutes, could have been a real blow to my love for audiobooks, but actually I am finding ways to integrate them into my home life as well. I’ve been listening on my iPod while I walk the dog, and I’ve started playing them while I do chores at home. I’ve found that if I turn it up enough to compete with the sound of running water, I can even listen while I do dishes. Which will perhaps encourage me to do dishes more often.

There are a few considerations to choosing a good audiobook. More, after the jump.

I check them out of the library, because they can be priced a bit prohibitively, and also I tend to want to listen to books I haven’t read, which carries with it the possibility that I won’t like it or want to keep it. So, library. I will listen to tapes if that’s all they have (I still have a tape player in my car) but the preferred method is to get CDs and then burn them to my computer so that I can listen to them on my iPod. It’s extremely convenient to put all eleven CDs of a book onto one little mp3 player and not have to be bothered with changing the discs, ever.

One thing I often forget to check is whether or not the book has been abridged (cut away from in places to make it shorter). At least two of the audiobooks I have listened to have been abridged copies, something I only found out after listening to them. Even though abridgements and edits can be done skillfully and seamlessly, so you don’t even notice, it still bothers me that I’m missing something. It’s the same reason I like to see movies uncut before I watch them on cable. Even if a scene or a swear word is missing, I can feel confident that I know where it was.

The most important consideration in an audiobook is the strength of the reader. If you don’t like their voice or their performance, you are out of luck. What’s cool is that a lot of relatively famous actors are now lending their voices to works of literature—I heard David Strathairn read Mystic River, for example, and right now I have The Heart is a Lonely Hunter read by Cherry Jones—and the ones who don’t have recognizable names are often like, thirty-year Broadway veterans or something.

The less gifted readers have a lot of problems. Some of the female readers have trouble making male-sounding voices; the readers of The Glass Castle and an Anne Tyler book called Digging to America both did this annoying thing when they were talking in the voice of men. They kind of artificially deepened their voices through inhaling a lot of air, and then came off sounding like windbags—literal and figurative windbags. It turned me off those male characters—I wanted them gone from every scene because it was so hard to listen to. The opposite happened, too; the guy who narrated The Corrections made me hate all the women in that book. (Or maybe I should blame that on the author, Jonathan Franzen, who seemed to be following the advice of Jack Nicholson’s character from As Good As It Gets on writing women: “I think of a man—then I take away reason and accountability.”)

In The Joy Luck Club, the reader struggled to differentiate the many husbands and fathers from one another by giving them weird verbal tics. Don’t even get me started on the one daughter’s husband who sounded like The Simpsons’ Professor Frink. I had a lot of problems with this reader, actually. I won’t deny that the book was, perhaps, a tour de force for a voice performer, having a zillion different characters, half of whom spoke in Chinese-accented English, but she slipped up a few times and applied the accent to an American-born character. She read the older women quite well, but when she played the younger ones she seemed to be speaking like a Valley girl, ending sentences on questions (“And so even though I knew my mother wouldn’t approve? I married him?”) and the like.

Some of the best readers were in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, which had two actors—a man and a woman. That was necessary because that book was short stories, and some of them were narrated by men, and the other half, by women. But even within a story—one narrated by a man, for instance—when he was speaking with a woman, the woman’s voice came in to do her dialogue. They both also handled accents capably, and they captured the tone of Lahiri’s prose quite beautifully.

Finally, I’ve listened to a lot of memoirs as audiobooks (the most recent was Running With Scissors), and the writers themselves are often employed to read the book. I’d say that Augusten Burroughs did a perfectly capable job; he has a flexible “actor”’s voice, and he gave certain characters their own unique cadences (his mother, for example, he gave a theatrical, breathless quality). David Sedaris is the master of this form, though. His writing is just miles better, but he also does a lot of public readings, and reads pieces on NPR all the time, so he knows what he’s doing there. I’ve listened to two of Sedaris’s audiobooks now, and they are first-rate entertainment.

Sometimes Sedaris’s audiobooks even provide a live reading of one of his pieces, which is the best, because you can hear the audience laughing, and there was a real energy that can be lacking in those studio performances. In fact, it’s like hearing Sedaris tell the story in person, which feeds the fantasy that I’m surrounded by witty raconteurs all the time—and isn’t that a noble goal for any kind of literary entertainment?