One summer when I had both a car and a job, when I was 23, I grew weary of my music selection. My navigator and deejay, Banzai, was also. That's when I began to listen to books on tape. Sometime before this I had lost my ability to read in a moving vehicle even as a passenger. I've been listening to books while driving alone or riding the bus since.
The idea disgusts some. One fellow bus passenger was horrified and insisted "It is better to read" [i.e. on paper] with her mouth pursed. Yeah, tell that to someone with faulty vision or ill in bed, or to someone who if she had been reading on that bus that day would've puked on your shoes.
Not the idea of reading aloud but the problem of interpretation distresses others. Yes, the narrator interprets and stands between the author and the reader. So do many factors in traditional reading: mood, weather, setting, comfort, quality of the manuscript.... I wouldn't rely on audio books for anything I had to refer too; browsing admittedly is difficult. I listen to fiction that doesn't require close reading: Pynchon would be right out. But Dickens and Hardy work well (listen to the howls). Okay, I broke my close-reading rule too: on 30 May 1997 I began to listen to Moby-Dick. As with most of my aduiobooks now, though, I read along as well, or at least skim.
I've been listening to audio books since I think the summer of 1991, but I didn't use to keep track of everything:
1999
2000
2001 2002 2003
1998
Winter Spring
through Fall of 1998
1997 Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
1996
Winter Spring
Summer Fall
Before
1995Connecticut
1995Denver
1995
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Last modified 26 December 2001
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