Audiobooks: yay or nay?

There’s this asinine argument in the book world over whether listening to audiobooks counts as “reading” or not. I think the argument is: if you’re not physically moving your eyes back and forth while understanding the words, it doesn’t count.

I don’t really agree with that. I feel like if you’re consuming books in one way or another, congrats, you’re reading.

Just… don’t eat them. Ok?

“Give them books and they’ll just tear out
the pages and eat the glue” -my dad

There are so many bigger and more concerning things in the book world (like racism, sexism, elitism, book banning, book burning, male authors not understanding literally anything about female anatomy, and the all-important Oxford comma debate) to be concerned over semantics of “reading” an audiobook.

This is not where I wanted this post to go. Back to the point: Audiobooks- yay or nay?

Until about 3 years ago, I was not a consumer of audiobooks. I think I willingly listened to 2-3 audiobooks in my whole life (one was called The Archer* that I checked out of the library to listen to on our family trip to Kansas City to visit my sister, I remember liking it… I should try to find it again) until I started working at an office job that let us listen to whatever we want to while we work. Once I exhausted my Pandora music stations and burned myself out on a ton of podcasts (the first couple of weeks after discovering true crime podcasts were some of the most paranoid times of my life), I decided to finally listen to my mom, download the Nebraska Overdrive app, and delve into audiobooks.

Let me tell you, digital audiobooks are a miracle. I remember my mom having audiobooks in huge binders of cassettes or CDs in the car for her six-hour-round-trip from Shelby to North Platte and back. It was all very stressful: struggling to change out the tapes or disks while keeping the car on the road going 75 mph, having to haul 37 lbs of plastic and booklet inserts with you just so you can keep listening to the book, and the constant terror of accidently losing one of the tapes or disks, rendering the whole book as nearly useless. 

Ok, that’s a thought and I’d love the librarians in the room to weigh in: what happened when you got an audiobook back in that was missing a piece? Did you just weed the whole thing, or could you contact the publisher and get a replacement?

The need for something besides Muzak to listen to and the allowance of audiobooks in the public library’s summer/winter reading programs was the incentive I needed. I quickly found out that I can’t listen to fiction while I work. I either focus too much on my work and miss important details of the book resulting in me being lost until I rewind the book and start the whole process over again, or I focus too much on the book and don’t work. Not a great idea.

So, I decided to try out nonfiction for work: specifically, historical nonfiction, humorous nonfiction, memoirs, and biographies. Now, that’s where it’s at. I’ve laughed out loud, I’ve ugly cried at my desk, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had so many nonfiction books and biographies on my TBR list for years but I’ve given up on physically reading them because I knew I’d give up halfway through. With audiobooks, I can stay busy while “reading” and actually finishing them.

That’s not to say I only listen to nonfiction audiobooks. I found out how much more fun solo road trips are with a good novel playing, so now I make sure to download one or two when I’m planning on getting some serious windshield time.

I also discovered how soothing they can be. On days where my anxiety is high, or I’m just overstimulated by life, music and podcasts are a no-go. It’s better to download an audiobook and let the narrator lull me into a temporary place of calm. 

Jenny Lawson is one of my favorites. While her voice is kind of chipmunk-like (her words, not mine), she’s hilarious and honest about her mental health struggles, and she reads her books with such emotion that it’s easy to relax listening to her. Plus, I’ve read/listened to her books probably half a dozen times at this point and we all know about people with anxiety and rewatching/relistening/rereading things. 

Caitlyn Doughty on the other hand has an incredibly soothing voice, but unless you’re into death culture and death in general, I’d maybe skip her books.

Oh, and don’t listen to a book about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in the middle of the Covid-19 Pandemic. It’s both anxiety-inducing and depressing considering the number of things we did wrong, again.

After those uplifting comments, where do you stand on the audiobook debate?

*I took a break to try to find the book I’m thinking of. It might be The Archer’s Tale by Bernard Cornwell but I actually can’t remember much about it beyond the main character being a young-ish lad, it explaining how amazing English longbowmen were (could have 3-4 arrows in the air at once), and how crappy early crossbows were in comparison. If anybody has read The Archer’s Tale and what I described sounds familiar —or not—, let me know.