Until this assignment, I had never listened to an audiobook. The closest I get is a yearly listen to Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which I have on the original  Caedmon LP (1958). In searching for audiobooks, I came across a claim that this particular recording was one of the first iterations of what we’d now call an audiobook. However, that is clearly untrue, as it only makes sense that recordings for the blind would have been produced since the early 20^th century, and Rubery confirms this in his brief history of recorded spoken word (62-63). Perhaps it marks an early example of a recorded fiction that was meant to appeal to the masses.

Because I had never listened to an audiobook I decided to pick something I’d never read. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 seemed like a good choice, since it’s about books, and although I’d seen the Truffaut film adaptation I’d never read the book. It’s a short novel as well, and because my time is extremely limited I wanted something that wouldn’t take too many hours, and which I wouldn’t have to listen to while doing other things or skip sections to get through it.  In other words, I made a conscious choice to listen to it in the same way I would have read it in an ideal scenario: solitary and with focus, and only on the subway or at the gym if necessary. But I also discovered that this approach to listening (i.e., as if it were reading) is extremely ingrained and very unconscious. While I was looking for something not too long, my main concern was that I tend to be a slow reader, and I was worried that even a recording of 5-6 hours might take longer for me to get through.  I was not anticipating a situation like the public reading of Dickens described by Rubery: a performance in which “the recitation of a scene that takes a mere ten minutes to read silently to one’s self can take upwards of forty minutes when read aloud before an audience” (58). I was anticipating somehow being a “slow listener,” because I was equating listening to the physical act of reading text and the cognitive act of interpreting it.

This led me to think more about my own bias towards the traditional reading experience and the weird neuroses that (I now recognize) go along with it. My ideal reading experience is tactile, focused, solitary–albeit too slow and occasionally distracted–and in some way amounts to an accomplishment once a book is finished. Not getting around to reading  books l’ve begun or reading “enough” books feels, to me, like not doing other things I like and really should do-–like going to the gym, seeing my friends more often, organizing my life more effectively.

But why should listening not count as a type of reading? Just as Edison advocated, blind people and those who cannot easily manipulate a book or e-reader undoubtedly consider it reading (62).  Although reading and listening engage different senses and “sense data” as well as different kinds of language processing, they both involve a reading voice and a narrative interacting with one’s imagination.  There are drawbacks to audiobooks (not everyone has a voice like Dylan Thomas) but for me the benefit is that I can concentrate entirely on the narrative without the act of reading mediating it. The physical process of reading and the inner voice that silently repeats the words can sometimes distract me from the world of the text. I am sure  this experience must vary according to the way one’s brain is wired. However, I think the verdict for me in terms of which is a more “effective” method will depend on how much I retain of Fahrenheit 451 and for how long.

There is so much I could write about Fahrenheit 451 in audio format and the way it accentuates elements of the novel that speak directly to contemporary culture and electronic media consumption. But that would entail a very long essay. “Meta” is an understatement, to say the least. Written in 1953, the novel explores reading vs. listening, memory vs. text, scripted reality, voyeuristic mass media, and the effects of ubiquitous audio devices in everybody’s ears, for example. It even includes a form of solitary, immersive narrative entertainment that has superseded the interior-yet-immersive experience that reading–whether visual or aural–can be. Broadcasts on the wall-sized television screens that define the “parlors” of people’s homes in the novel enact the “secondary orality” discussed by Ong and Donoghue. In fact, they are precisely the “programmes imitating participatory communities such as book groups without actually bringing readers into contact with other human beings” (69). At the conclusion of Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist discovers real human connection–and himself–through interacting with others who value books, reading, and the roles creative thought and narrative play in humanizing the world.