Over the past year and a half that I’ve been living in Connecticut, I’ve gradually succumbed to being a commuter. That is, I essentially live in my car. It started with always leaving my gym bag — complete with sneakers, extra socks and underwear, gym clothes, set of regular clothes, extra headphones, shampoo and conditioner, and towel — in the backseat of my car. Then I started keeping extra water bottles around (okay, to be fair, I’ve always left empty water bottles around, but I just recently started refilling and keeping them available so I don’t have to leave the car to get more). I’ve started leaving my textbook and class notes in the car, removing them only to study at remote locations; just this week I’ve left the novel that I’m reading on the passenger seat, figuring it will be more likely to end up where I am if it’s not on my bedside table. Today I crossed an important threshhold – well, three important threshholds, actually: commuter culture escape velocity, middle age, and abject lameness. That’s right, I got a book on CD. From the public library.
Now, my feelings on audiobooks are complicated. On the one hand, I have fond memories of my dad (an extremely avid Book-on-Tape purveyor) listening to them on long car trips, figuring that since each of his three children were choosing the world inside their individual CD player headphones over forced family interaction, he may as well monopolize the car stereo to listen to a voice actor read him Clive Cussler novels. Okay, that’s maybe a bit heavy-handed on the sarcasm — I actually do have fond memories of those car trips, emerging from my angsty Tori Amos haze to listen to the end of a particular riveting chapter when we were wending through Pennsylvania backroads, still an interminable hour from my grandmother’s house. Furthermore, I have a wealth of extremely positive memories surrounding the act of being read to. My parents read to us as children, of course, but my dad and I actually read books together until I was almost twelve (i.e. too cool). He first read me what were to become some of my favorite books of all time (Watership Down, The Chronicles of Narnia). We read every single Hardy Boys book (a task, by the way, that proves that my dad loves me – have you ever read two of those books? One is exactly the same as the next, thrilling for an eight-year-old, torture for her post-doctorate-holding father.) And my family still gets a big kick out of the fact that he introduced me to some pretty heavy theology and philosophy before the idea that humans were fallible and corrupt was even a twinkle in my young sinner’s eye: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis); Enchantress From the Stars (Sylvia Engdahl); and other religious and existential allegory disguised as sci-fi (my entire personality is starting to make sense now, you see.) I hope to share chapter books with my children the way they were shared with me, and I do believe that some stories are meant to be experienced as part of an oral tradition.
However, on the other hand, I love books. I say “books” and not “reading” because it’s more accurate – I love the visceral experience of reading a book: the choice of font, the weight of the paper, the kerning and spacing on the page; the smell of a new book, and how that smell is distinct from that of a decades-old library book; the weight of a book in my purse; the act of underlining and notating in margins (something I don’t do anymore but did regularly in high school.) Most of all, I love the act of choosing to read over any other activity. It’s such a luxury that I basically abandoned once I started college (though I’d read hungrily over the summers) and completely did away with once I started working full time – the only time I’d ever read was on the subway to and from work, and once I started working at a literary agency and reading for a living…forget it.
So in a way, listening to books on tape is kind of the ultimate “fuck you” to books: not only am I forgoing the tangible joys of the experience of reading, looking at and feeling the physical book, but I’m also going to divorce myself from the personal aspect of listening to a story told by someone I love; that is, I’m going to be read to by a nameless, faceless stranger, a disembodied voice, someone hired to read to me, if by me you mean anyone at all. Still, when I moved back home, I promised myself that I’d read more, and it’s a promise that I’ve largely failed to keep: I read in 30-minute spurts when I have downtime at the hospital and occasionally right before falling asleep. But — and this is one of the things I hate most about living in the suburbs again — my day-to-day life is largely spent in the car, commuting along the southern Connecticut shoreline (and into NYC on weekends). I want to take in more books, and this is a lot of time that I’m not doing anything else particularly valuable. I’m not so principled about the way in which I absorb this material not to at least try it out…so thus begins this little experiment!
The book I got, by the way, is Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, not because I’ve been dying to read (listen to?) it, but because it was literally the best option (aside from the novelization of The Phantom Menace, and Everything Nelson DeMille Has Ever Written, of course. I briefly considered getting the Harry Potter books read by Jim Dale, which I’ve heard are marvelous, actually, but I wanted to get something I hadn’t yet read [listened to?]). I’ve listened to disc 1 so far, and it’s been…weird, mostly to have to accept this voice actor’s interpretation of the text. I hated it through the whole first chapter, but now I’m settling into this particular speech act, and I’m actually enjoying myself. We’ll see how long this keeps up.
[Oh, and... as my brackets and parentheses indicate, am I still allowed to claim that I've "read" these books once I'm done listening to them? Is the act of reading -- sensory input through the eyes -- essential to the meaning of reading? And is that term, "reading," the same as listening to the book be read, or am I missing out on the authenticity of the book experience? Paging Walter Benjamin.]
