Quote:
Originally Posted by sealbeater
Do I?
Because I find people who have to listen to words rarely have put in the practice to be good readers.
If you would rather listen to an audiobook than read a book, you or your parents were lazy when you were a child and you find it easier to listen to someone read to you, as if you were a young child who did not yet know how to read.
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I began listening to audiobooks for fun, mostly while driving. I'd always been an avid reader. Audiobooks in those days were only available, as far as I knew, in 60 minute abridgements of the classics, along with just a few modern novels, mostly mysteries, on cassette. Before that I used to listen to the poetry readings on Caedmon at the public library, along with some short story readings. They'd always been fun to listen to although they had nothing to do with my pleasure in reading. They were a different thing to me entirely.
About the time full length audiobooks became available I developed cataracts. Reading gave me really bad eyestrain and, as a programmer who had to keep up with the technology, I had to reserve what reading I could do for work related things. Due to a childhood injury they weren't willing to risk surgery until the cataracts got so bad I was getting blind anyway. I got the surgery.
At that point I'd been listening to audiobooks since I could no longer read novels, for quite a few years. I don't recall how many. Maybe 7 or 8 years. Suddenly I could read again and I began to do so on my Palm. But by then I was so used to audiobooks that that's what I mostly did. That lasted several more years till 2009 when I got my first Kindle, a Kindle 3.
I began reading and just lost interest in listening. Since then I've only listened to 3 or 4 full audiobooks as well as a lot of short stories. The simple fact is that I prefer reading and it took me a while to figure that out. But I still remember the pleasure I got from audiobooks and it was no small pleasure.
There are a number of books I've read and re-read over the decades since I was young. I've probably read "The Good Earth" and "Peyton Place" and "The Egyptian" and "Of Mice and Men" and a few others every 5 years since the mind 1950s. When I was listening I found excellent narrations of those books. I listened to most of them more than once. Since then I've read them all. I can't honestly say which was the better experience; which I enjoyed more.
One set of books, the Travis McGee books, were only available in those days in abridgements read by Darrin McGavin. I listened to those and loved how he read them. I'd read them myself years before. Recently I read one of them again. I've pretty much decided I'd rather listen to them than read them. McGavin does them so well. I just can't put as much life into them myself. I have them and I've already ripped most of the tapes and I'll listen from now on.
There's nothing lazy about this. About me. I'm the guy who decided to read "The Canterbury Tales" in Middle English and fought my way through it, loving every difficult minute. I read because I love reading. I listened because I love reading.
There is one huge drawback to listening: not all books are available with good narrators. A bad narrator can really hurt a book and they definitely turn it into a lesser experience. Unfortunately everyone has a different idea of which are the bad narrators. Of course I'm the one who gets it right.
Sometimes a good narrator really improves a book; and that can even be true with an excellent book. Graham Greene's "Monsignor Quixote", an excellent novel, narrated by Cyril Cusack, is a thing of beauty. No reading from my mind could ever breathe so much life into a book.
Barry