Is listening to a book cheating?

Listening to books activates the same brain areas as reading them. Photo / 123RF

No, audiobooks are not a lesser art form than printed books.

Although audiobooks are the fastest growing segment of publishing, there are still plenty of people who believe that listening to a book is somehow low and lazy, that, put baldly, it’s cheating. I suppose this attitude springs from the “work ethic” in which we Americans are said to believe. In this view, reading is virtuous in the same way that working is – while listening amounts to some kind of handout.

But is listening to a book cheating? For one thing, the question doesn’t even make sense for people with impaired vision or reading disorders like dyslexia. Furthermore, for the millions whose days include commuting and generally slogging away at dull tasks, audiobooks have arrived to redeem time lost to drudgery and tedium. Listeners are able to enjoy books they’d never have had time to otherwise. In this respect, audiobooks were made for getting things done.

Disparaging audiobooks often springs from the feeling that a listener can’t take in a book as fully as a reader can. Neuroscientists have, of course, weighed in on the subject. The conclusion reached in the arduously titled 2019 study “The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading is Invariant to Stimulus Modality” from the Journal of Neuroscience is, in a nutshell, that we understand words whether they are read or heard.

Because neuroscience can’t separate what our brains are doing from what our minds are thinking, this revelation doesn’t really address the question of comprehension as it applies to books. Most audiobook listeners know very well that the experiences of reading and listening to a book are different; for one thing, the listener tends to retain less of most books than the reader does.

It is also true that audiobooks can be spoiled by their narrators, memoirs being frequent casualties. Although their authors may speak from the heart, many are simply not accomplished readers. A recent example is Geraldine Brooks’ narration of her memoir of grief, Memorial Days, (Penguin, five hours). The book is well written and very moving, but Brooks’ delivery is enervated and enervating, as if she is not so much sharing her story as ploughing through the task word by word. This may reflect her state of mind, which is understandable but a pity nonetheless.

That’s the bad news, but there’s much more that’s good. Curtis Sittenfeld’s collection of stories, Show Don’t Tell (Random House, seven hours) is a case in point. Read in print in one sitting, short stories tend to lose their individuality and internal movement. These, however, are delivered by different narrators (with a few doubling up). The professional narrators are Michael Crouch, Nicole Lewis, George Newbern, Emily Rankin, Xe Sands and Kristen Sieh, all adroitly capturing the diverse characters from whose point of view these confessional stories spring. One story, however, is handled by Sittenfeld herself who, though somewhat stilted in delivery, perfectly carries off the supercilious voice of a onetime preppy – which of course she is.

Audiobook narration can rise to an art – or, at least, high craft – especially with fiction and poetry, where skilled narrators can bring out or amplify a dimension that was only potential in print. This is markedly true when the narrator has lived in the region in which the book is set. South Carolinian Will Patton, for instance, while brilliant in narrating just about anything, truly excels delivering novels set in the South, such as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series. Bridgerton’s Adjoa Andoh, whose father is Ghanian, has narrated books set all over the world but is consummate mistress of African accents, including works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Abi Daré.

Audiobooks can also help those with dyslexia or visual impairments enjoy literature. Photo / 123RF

And then there is Irishman Gerard Doyle, whose delivery of Adrian McKinty’s detective novels set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles is the ideal place to begin if you’ve never listened to a book. There are now eight of them, all starring Sean Duffy, a rare Catholic in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The first, The Cold, Cold Ground, (Blackstone, 10 hours) is set in 1981 and the most recent, Hang on St. Christopher, (Blackstone, nine hours) in 1992, as Ulster continues to be a bloody theatre of bombs, ambushes and assassinations. But while the novels perfectly evoke the grim historical setting, and action and suspense abound, their true greatness lies in the wit, dark humour and snap of the dialogue. Doyle renders it perfectly, the varieties of regional accents and of the acrobatics of Irish ways and rhythms of speech: the sly insults, back chat and dark whimsy.

These books show what audiobooks can achieve; listen to one and you are hooked for life. And while, no, technically speaking you are not reading, neither are you shirking. Instead you have found a way to experience the expansion of mind, pleasure and transport that lies silent within books.