You can’t read an audiobook
A writer acquaintance told me that he primarily reads audiobooks. He then said, “That’s reading by the way.”
Which foreclosed the question I suppose because I wasn’t bothered to have an argument. Of course he was defensive because what he said is bullshit. And, arguably, or so I’ll argue, it’s part of the reason why his writing isn’t that great.
Brother, I know you’re very successful, but I don’t know how those damned readers get past the first chapter.
Listening to an audio book is not reading, it’s listening. They are two different things, not in any way the same. They share only one important characteristic: the disembodied voice.
This is the subject of Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy piece. There he analyzes Plato’s critique of writing. Roughly, because the text is removed from the author’s entire personhood (feel free to propose a better term), it is a poison. The detachment lends strange powers to the alienated text / audio book, which now removed from the living and fallible flesh of the author is immortalized and compelling, like bad magic.
Derrida doesn’t think it’s purely poison, but that’s another story. Both a written text and a spoken text on your iPhone possess the disembodied voice, detached from the author’s body in all of its fullness and immediacy.
When you read you are activating the textual notation and the characters and character images that you process as whole ideas. You don’t read the letters, you take in the word as a fully formed concept. It’s a form of decoding that you must become familiar with, unlike spoken language which seems to be innate. You aren’t born to read.
Consider the incredible magic of orthographic mapping, the combination of seeing and sounding or hearing and seeing a look / sound.
In terms of the Pharmakon, I’d think that a disembodied voice in your head, without the decoding of written language, seems to be a darker magic than plain old reading. Reading is active, listening can be dangerously passive. It’s a weird thing to see people walking around with their heads stuffed full of ear buds, all listening to a disembodied voice in their head.
Just read a little about Julien Jayne’s theory of the bicameral mind and you’ll see what i mean.
The other thing is that my friend’s a writer. This makes it all so much worse.
Reading written text, over and over, from many different writers, produces a familiarity with written language that cannot be replaced by a narrator’s voice. By reading you become familiar with how writing looks, what sentences look like when they’ve been professionally proof read. The way the commas go there, and the hyphens go in other places. By reading you become an expert of writing in the same way that someone who watches fifty films a week will, after a few years, become an expert on filmmaking. She might not become a film director but she’s got the film language embedded in her, completely.
So, read friend, read. And get those dumb things out of your ear and pay attention to what’s actually happening so you can write more interesting and true things.