Until recently, I had never listened to an audiobook. I work from home, so I don’t have a commute where I would be sitting in front of a CD/MP3 player for an extended period of time just listening. In addition, I read pretty quickly, so I thought being forced to listen to a book at the pace of someone else’s reading instead of my own reading pace could be frustrating. However, my wife and I just drove from Chicago to Asheville, N.C., for the first leg of our vacation, and before we left, we checked out three audiobooks to listen to on the drive.
We started with the shortest audiobook: Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark. I am a big Muriel Spark fan but hadn’t read this later short novel of hers, which was based on the historical case of Lord Lucan. I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook during the drive, and didn’t have any problems with the pace. The only issues I had were logistical: one of the CDs was scratched, so we had to fast-forward through some parts, and the volume of our (older) car on the highway sometimes made it difficult to hear the quieter sections of narration. Overall, however, it was a nice change of pace to listening to music or podcasts (our usual roadtrip fare).
One aspect that I hadn’t expected was how, instead of a dry, affectless reading of the text, the narrator (a British actress whose name I don’t remember) acted out the voices of the different characters. The younger female characters had high, melodious voices, while the older male characters had flat, gruff voices, and she even did Scottish accents for the Scottish characters. The effect was similar to being read a bedtime story by a parent, albeit one about a man who murdered his nanny and attempted to murder his wife.
This led me to think about how few, if any, modern novels are written to be read out loud, and how this impacts the audiobook industry. A passage that could read terrifically could sound awkward, and vice-versa. It would be analogous to people buying textual descriptions of pieces of music (yes, there is music criticism, but that tends to be supplemental to the music itself, not the replacement that the audiobook is for the paper book). Is there an industry of authors who write solely for audiobook? This could be interesting, a return to oral storytelling. Could audiobooks be made more theatrical, with background music or sound effects, similar to old-time radio shows? Could different voice actors act the dialogue of the various characters? Basically, could audiobooks be made more their own entity instead of just straight readings of their source books?
