Listening ≠ Reading
Jim Harris, a lifelong bookworm, cracked the covers of only four books last year. But he listened to 54, all unabridged. . . .
"I haven't read this much since I was in college," said Mr. Harris, 53, a computer programmer in Memphis. And yes, he does consider it "reading." "I dislike it when I meet people who feel listening is inferior," he said.
Fortunately for Mr. Harris, the ranks of the reading purists are dwindling. Fewer Americans are reading books than a decade ago, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, but almost a third more are listening to them on tapes, CD's and iPods.
Sorry Jim, but when you listen to a book on your iPod, you are no more reading that book than you are reading a baseball game when you listened to Vin Scully do play-by-play for the Dodgers.
It gets worse:
But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else.
Well, if you're doing something else then you're not really reading, now are you? Listen Jim, and all other audiobookphiles out there: If I can barely wrap my little mind around Vollmann while I'm holding the book right before my face and re-reading each sentence 5 times each, how in the hell am I going to understand it if some nitwit is reading it to me while I'm brewing a cappuchino on my at-home Krups unit?
It's not reading. It's pretending that you give a damn about books when you really care so little about them that you'll try to process them at the same time you're scraping Pookie's dog craps up off the sidewalk.
When are people going to get the message? Books are not TV. Books are not movies. Books are not the internet. They're not radio. They're not plays, they're not songs, they're not paintings, performance art, gymnastics. They're just freaking books. You hold them in your lap and stick your nose down in them and stay still for hours at a time except for when you turn the pages with your fingers. That's a book. That's reading a book. Nothing else.
Listen, I'm perfectly willing to believe that you audio people out there can obtain some kind of pleasure from your audiobook experience. Great. More power to you. But don't go pretending like you're some kind of big-time reader because you consumed the complete works of Balzac via mp3. No, you're some guy who listened to an iPod while cooking dinner.
It goes on:
Gloria Reiss, 51, of St. Louis, said her officemates correct her when she mentions having read a book.
"They'll say, 'You didn't read it, you just listened to it,' " said Ms. Reiss, who switched to audio when her two jobs and three poodles made it hard to find time to curl up on the couch. Recently a colleague refused her urging to take a Stephanie Plum mystery along on a long drive.
"She goes, 'I like to read my books,' " Ms. Reiss said, "like that makes her better than me."
Oh righteous indignation! You go girl!
This is so like us, isn't it? We spend more and more time at work and doing all kinds of other crap, but we just keep trying to cram more and more in. Maybe, you know, combining things is the new American paradigm? Maybe we can listen to audiobooks while watching the newest Desperate Housewives (subtitled, of course), while stitching, and walking on a treadmill. Heck, if we can cram those 4 leisure activities together, think how much time that will leave to spend at the office, not to mention how much time we'll have for agonizing over how we're going to make that next home payment.
