Audio vs. Physical Books: Reading into Storytelling Traditions

How we read is a topic that tends to come up in conversations that I have as much as – if not more than ideas related to the content of books. After all, there are now three major avenues to read most novels, and it can be interesting to consider how those formats change individual experiences of the work.

I have experience reading in all three formats – audio, physical and electronic – but mostly tend towards the former two. As such I won’t touch much on e-books and similar formats today, though I’ve heard great things about dedicated e-reader devices.

Today I’ll give my thoughts on the pros and cons of both audio and physical book formats, with some examples from the novels and authors I’ve consumed.

A Focused Reading

The feel and smell of opening a physical book can be hard to beat. A cozy spot and an enthralling novel have seen me pass hours, days and weeks away - especially when sick or otherwise stuck at home, but even on a random Saturday if the book is gripping enough. If one were to believe BookTok, Bookstagram, Tumblr and the cute reader aesthetics that have permeated social media, this is how a lot of very cool people spend nearly every waking moment! But that's all varying degrees of tangential.

Disconnection

Jasnah Kholin, transcendent scholar and queen - by Puradise

When it comes down to it, physical books demand focus and attention. We need to be able to put down our phones, turn off the TV and pause our conversations if we want to meaningfully engage with them. That in itself is an increasingly difficult leap to take, requiring an intentional detachment from the buzzing and excited world around us.

Between 2014 and 2020, that act of disconnection was nearly insurmountable for me. The exceptions were a few novels for university - which I still struggled through, despite falling in love with some of them (Ancillary Justice, Wildfell, Neuromancer) later - and A Song of Ice and Fire, which offered me a world and community to lose myself in.

It took three significant changes in 2020 to transform me into the person before you, who reads dozens of physical books per year. Obviously, COVID-19. Then The Dresden Files, which combines wild urban fantasy with the pace and tension of great thrillers (I've discussed before the idea of finding smoother entry points into reading if you're struggling). Finally, being diagnosed and medicated for my ADHD - who'd have thought?

Reading - especially close and/or critical reading - is an active task: it aligns closer with the experience of playing a video game or solving a puzzle than that of watching a movie or scrolling through social media. That can make it intimidating, consciously or not, when we are facing that necessary disconnection to pick up and engage with a book.

Immersion

Quote from (and fan art of) Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves by Aaafsew

Fortunately, the difficulty of engaging with physical books is balanced by the incredibly rewarding experience of fully inhabiting the world and characters of a novel. It is a transcendent feeling to step away from The Secret History with the characters' anxious paranoia clinging to me; likewise to viscerally hate Dolores Umbridge and Adora Crellin years and months after reading The Order of the Phoenix and Sharp Objects respectively.

A final note is that some books are simply designed around the physical format. House of Leaves is a work of genius for how it plays with its structure and metafictional narratives. I'd be curious whether a Braille version is viable, but any other adaptation is laughable for how much of the experience would be lost.

I'll also mention Moby Dick here; I'd love to delve into the topic of structure-as-narrative in the future, but suffice to say that listening to Herman Melville's 1851 novel felt as frustrating as I imagine a House of Leaves audiobook would. A hidden extra positive of the physical: it makes skipping around so much more practical.

Listen Up!

Worlds delivered to your ears - generated by AI

I first entered the world of audiobooks in that 2014-2020 period when physical novels felt like they were beyond my abilities. They got me through long early morning shifts stocking shelves, TTC rides to and from school, and more recently have incentivized me to embrace and enjoy long walks.

You might spot a pattern there, and the big difference between audio and physical in my experience: audiobooks simply don't require the same level of attention and focus. For me, they are a perfect way to bring entertainment to otherwise menial activities. Quality and taste still matter, of course. Outland, Fourth Wing and parts of Moby Dick have made my walks and TTC trips feel exponentially longer; whereas Brandon Sanderson and Robin Hobb's fantasy novels have transformed some otherwise miserable experiences into merely "what I was doing when I read about X."

Thanks for the nightmares, AI!

For me, this flexibility comes at the price of consistent engagement. (Granted I do have minor auditory processing issues that may be a factor here, but generally audiobook narrators are crisply understandable.) I think you can reach a point of active listening to a book, but it is by no means the default.

It would take an incredible level of focus to appreciate every nuance of an audiobook. My mind easily wanders; whether thinking about a part of the book, in response to something in the world around me or just remembering something out of the blue, sentences and paragraphs of audiobooks can slip past me effortlessly. A physical book would often see me pause in these moments, or at least notice I haven't been processing what I'm reading and return to where I was before the interruption. You can do that on audio, but it can be frustratingly fiddly.

Technically, there are stories (often podcasts repackaged as audiobooks) that have been built from the ground up for the audio format just as House of Leaves was made for physical. I've yet to personally listen to one that couldn't be turned into prose, though. My cynical view after listening to Impact Winter is that production value is often attempting to cover for half-baked writing. But I'd be interested to hear of well-executed examples!

A stray thought which inspired the title: audiobooks, podcasts and the like probably feel natural to us because of the prevalence of oral storytelling in the lives of our ancestors and their cultures. In away, physical books may be the tangent from what is traditional.

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The moral? Books are great, go and read one! (After devouring more of my excellent posts, of course :P ). If you've yet to try audiobooks and have been struggling to pick up your physical ones lately, give them a shot! Same goes for the other way around - it's all just reading in the end ^^

Any observations you have on this topic? Have plans for the eclipse? (Speaking of, Black Sun is a great book about a crow god and a sun god, check it out!)

Thanks for reading. Until next week, much love <3