Aggies come from all over Texas — Houston, DFW, San Antonio, Austin, West Texas and a number of other places — as well as from other states and sometimes even international locations. The reality is that unless your family lives in Houston or is so far away you have to fly, it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to have to take a multi-hour road trip to go back home for the upcoming holidays.
Like most of us here, my family lives a decent way away: Abilene, Texas. For those who don’t know where that is or how long it takes to get there, it’s about a four-and-a-half-hour drive from College Station.
It’s a pretty long time to be on the road, and I have to fill it with something. Fortunately, I’ve discovered an antidote to the boredom that these long road trips often deliver: audiobooks.
Although I could read a physical book while driving, something tells me that if I tried I’d probably end up without a functional car — or body — by the end of the trip. Instead of doing that, whenever I’m on the road for a long time, I can stay entertained or informed by simply pressing the play button on Audible. From that point on, I can set my mind on anything from Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” to Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia” while still maintaining my attention on traffic.
However, once I pull into my driveway back home and tell my family how great it is being able to read my audiobooks while I’m going down the road, they’ll inevitably say something like, “That’s cool and all, but audiobooks aren’t real books, so technically you weren’t reading. You were just listening.”
Of course, it’s a comment meant in jest, and that’s the way I take it. But on the other hand, I think this attitude underscores — not just for my family, but for many people — a generally undeserved disdain of audiobooks. More than that, the arguments commonly used against audiobooks fundamentally misunderstand what they really are: They’re not just supposed to weakly imitate physical books, but instead they inhabit their own space as a special form of artistic expression.
How do these allegedly inferior versions of physical books deliver the same content to us in new ways? They do so through emotional and phrasal emphasis delivered by narrators.
Narration, a key element to literally any spoken work, is often looked down upon in book reader circles as something that we would be better off without. At best, it’s often portrayed as unneeded, while at worst, some claim that the narrator “steals” something from the reader by taking away the reader’s own imagination and interpretation.
Without even considering the benefits of narration, it is immediately clear that this usual line of attack is quite uncharitable to the narrators while failing to mention the myriad of other ways in which authors, movie directors, musicians, painters and other creative artists “steal” from art consumers by including too much information within their work.
Should we have no more lyrics in songs because it is better to speculate about the musician’s meaning when it is only conveyed through musical instruments? Should we never watch a movie again because actually seeing the people act out the story is too much? No; instead, different mediums and modes of art leave the consumer with different needs of interpretation. What is necessary for one element of art is not sufficient for all.
This is where audiobooks differ from traditional physical books in their mode of artistic expression. They convey more information about the author’s intent to the reader, and in so doing allow the reader a more informed picture of what is going on.
Emotional emphasis — or the emphasis of certain emotions within a text by having the narrator speak as if they had those emotions — helps us to see character interactions in a whole new light. It can help us to really realize the gravity of struggle or success, fears and failures. Those things can be powerful on a normal page, but hearing the narrator weep with despair or shout with relief invigorates the story in an entirely new way.
Similarly, phrasal emphasis — or the emphasis of certain words or phrases within a text to convey specific meaning — can help us to grasp what the author is actually attempting to say without being distracted by other elements of the text. We can understand new and hidden meanings within the text.
Maybe if a character stresses one particular phrase of a question we would think they are asking a rhetorical question, while if they stress a different phrase the question seems accusatory. Yet another and the question becomes a pleading for mercy. There are many expressions of voice that can be lost in the text, and it can be powerful to recover these meetings with a narrator’s emphasis.
These common forms of narrative expression can only be found in audiobooks. Maybe you can imitate them with italics and exclamation marks, but the emotional impact remains lessened. This is the powerful medium that audiobooks allow us to explore.
Even putting all of this aside, audiobooks are better than not reading at all. If we want more people to really read — and we should, because it’s better to be informed than not — we should not ostracize certain readers because they are allegedly experiencing an inferior form of book. Instead, we should embrace all artistic mediums with their own merits. The certainty provided by authorial power can be valuable to some; the abstraction provided by a plain-text reading a virtue to others. Ultimately, the choice is up to you.
Kaleb Blizzard is a philosophy sophomore and opinion writer for The Battalion.
