Brugge Blog

Now that I can bike to work, my days of listening to Books On Tape during my commute look to be over. Having a half hour to listen to a good story made the long drive to and from work something I would look forward to. Now my drive is just over five minutes, or biking its around 15 minutes, neither of which is conducive (or attractive) to listening to a book.

After some withdrawal pains, I’m realizing some of the things that are so great about listening to books:

• listening to a story told by a very good reader. I read to my kids all the time, but being a reader who becomes a central part of the story through their voice is a very different skill. And even though some recorded books advertise “read by the author” I’ve learned that that is no guarantee of a good listening experience. Reading and writing are two different skills. For example, listen to Jim Dale reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix or Lynne Thigpen reading How Stella Got Her Groove Back and you’ll see how they become part of the book. An exception to the warning about authors as readers is Barbara Kingsolver reading Prodigal Summer, something that makes the book completely hers.
• finding a book that I would not have read otherwise. Since the selection of books on tape at the library is an order of magnitude (or more) smaller than the general collection of books, I would often look for something to listen to by browsing, not by searching. With the size of the collections in any particular library, I could usually scan everything in 20 minutes or so. I came across Moneyball once, and remembering seeing it mentioned in a New Yorker article, and enjoyed it enough to track down other books by Michael Lewis. Then there was The Story of Philosophy (in two parts) by Will Durant, or Americans On Everest, by James Ramsey Ullman. I might have been slightly intrigued if I saw them while browsing the library, but I would never have checked them out.
• listening to a book that I would not have taken the time for otherwise. I love reading, but with a full work and family life, relaxed reading time usually means the time in bed at night, which, while relaxing, ends up stealing time from needed sleep. Having forced drive time where I couldn’t do anything else productive was the perfect place to fill that need. For instance, I don’t know when I would have ever gotten around to reading Doctor Zhivago, but it was sitting on the shelf during one of my passes, and the reading of it was masterful. Same thing with Right Ho Jeeves, and A Passage To Inda. Then there writers of whom I could read everything, like John McPhee or Farley Mowat, but who would shut out anyone else if I filled my normal reading time with them. Listening to The Control of Nature, or Born Naked gives me a ration of them on the road.
• listening to a book at the pace of the author, so that you can’t skip ahead. Sure, you can rewind or fast-forward, but you can’t speed read. And if the story has dramatic tension in it, like the races in Seabiscuit, you have to live at the pace of the story. With Seabiscuit, I’m sure I would have peeked ahead once or twice to see if he won, but listening to it meant I got drama almost like I was there at the race, or listening to it on the radio like millions did. My pulse was up after those scenes.
• doing something else while listening. This appeals to the efficiency factor in me, and while most of the time I used it during driving time, there were a few times when I needed to finish before the due date, and would listen while washing the dishes or folding clothes. This point, I guess, it was ultimately enabled all of the other points, since listening still takes time, and now that I can’t overlap it well with anything else I won’t be doing it.

So now that that driving hour has been replaced with a lunch hour, I’m trying to see if I can use that to fill the other need I’ve felt: to write, where there is really no other way to do it but to do it.