2 posts tagged “reading habits”

There was just an article in the New York Times -- "Your Cheatin' Listenin' Ways" by Andrew Adam Newman -- about audiobooks and the controversy around them. More than having anything to say about it, I thought I'd share the link because it pertains to this blog's general subject.

I posted my initial thoughts on audiobooks after listening to Water for Elephants a few months ago, and I have an even stronger opinion of them now. I don't buy into the idea that listening to books on tape (or CD, or iPods, or whatever) is necessarily "cheating."

Well. Now that I've got myself all worked up about it, I'm going to try to compile a list of my own, personal, pros and cons.

Pros

• Audiobooks are excellent for multitasking. For me, this usually means listening while a) shelving books for my job at the library, b) doing other solitary tasks involving hands, like cleaning, knitting and (hah!) "working out," or c) just walking around campus. The third one's really rare, because I hate the antisocial implications of someone walking around plugged in.
• They give you a feel for a book otherwise unattainable. (At this point in the list I realize that I'm probably not the best person to be making it, having listened to only one book. But whatever. Too late.) This is especially true -- I suppose, anyway -- if the narrator's a good one.
  
• All foreign, slash would-be foreign but really just intelligent words you don't know, are pronounced correctly.
• They're easy.
  

Cons

• As Mariam once pointed out to me, they lack the great, inimitable effect of real, tangible paper and ink. You can't flip through and read the table of contents and admire the cover when you're bored. And you can't go back and reread your favorite parts half as easily.
• For me, a big one is I can't write in them. I have a constant fear of forgetting things -- not just things, like dates and names, but thoughts, my own thoughts. It's why I have so many blogs and journals and a big part of why I take notes in books. For this reason, even though I have 11 more audiobooks to pick up from Audible, I have a really hard time deciding what books to listen to, because I'm afraid it'll have such a big impact that I'll regret not being able to annotate. I know. This con is nerdtastic lykwoah.
• They do encroach on the Imagination Territory a little. As I said before, not nearly so much as movies and other adaptations based on books, but still. Voices and accents count for something.
  
• When other people tell you they've listened to a book you spent hard-earned time and concentration actually reading, you get miffed. It's 'cause they're easy.

Uhh. So, I got pretty much nowhere with those lists, but whatever. Audiobooks are no replacement for "real" reading, but people who use them aren't cheaters. Guess what! All the words, printed or spoken, are the same. You're not necessarily any smarter for reading a book as opposed to listening to it; it just shows that you can read.

After all: in a perfect world, words, whether taken in by the ears or the eyes, should be processed the same way, so what's the difference?

I think the stigma surrounding audio-reading is basically just nostalgia. People don't like the idea of doing something so institutionalized, so dependable, in any other way. My own reservations about it have to do with this, as do, I'm pretty sure, most arguments attacking it.

This discussion excludes, of course, abridged books. That is a different topic altogether and yo, I'm not in the mood. :)

What's your stance on audiobooks? 

Okay, well, I still have no recently finished books, so I thought I'd talk about something else that's terribly fascinating, like reading habits.

Quoting from my own LJ post dated 6/16/05:

I just read an interesting article about the controversy of writing in books: underlining, highlighting, note-taking, dog-earing, etc.

I used to be a strict "Preservationist", as he calls it, to the point where I would try not to open paperbacks too wide when I read them as to keep the spines uncreased. I still do that sometimes, right after buying a brand new book just because I love that brand new book feeling.

But, thanks to Mrs. Grabowski's insistence on it in ninth grade, I've grown more used to writing and especially underlining in my books. I've tried the whole separate note-taking deal, but I get lazy and so any notes I would've liked go untaken. Plus, a lot of my markings are to emphasize lines and quotes from books, and it takes entirely too much effort to copy every one down.

Since I read that article, which was reinforced in Leveen's book, A Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (recommended), I've been writing in almost every book I read, provided that I own it.

It doesn't always work well; for easy fast-paced lit and children's fiction, I usually have so little to write that the few underlinings that happen make me regret ruining a perfectly good-condition book. But usually I have more to do, and it helps enormously for essays/tests on assigned reading.

Last summer I was so consumed with the idea that I actually read a book about writing in books--Marginalia
by H. J. Jackson. For the record, that was interesting, but not particularly helpful.

Common tactics of mine:

• Underlining. Of course. This is mostly for quotes I find significant or meaningful, which would often make sense even without context.
  
• <>, [], and {} around phrases or sentences. I use them interchangeably, but if you give me enough time I could probably break it up into some kind of system. I use these for things that interest me within the book; for example, a plot twist or obvious character development.
  
• Occasionally, {} around big blocks. Serve purpose of quotes too long to underline.
  
• Dotted underline, for words or phrases I don't understand/can't remember the meaning of. Along with this, I put a little tick mark (`) on the very outer corner of the page, so they're easy to find when I go back to look the words up. Problem is, I never do it.
• Stars in the margin. For the Very Significant.
• Annotations. The range varies in importance. For nonfiction, it's usually just a phrase summarizing an important paragraph. Sometimes it's a personal reaction/question. Often, it's just "lol" or "wtf?".
• I've tried other stuff, like indexing important events at the back of the book, summarizing each chapter after it finishes, [for school] putting class discussion notes inside the few blank pages. Some work and some don't, usually depending on the book and my mood at the time.

Lately, I've had the notion that I should stick to one pen color throughout the reading of a book, so when (if...) I reread it, I can use a different color and see the differences (gasp! dork unveiled!). I have a set of nice colored ballpoints for the purpose; now if only I could find them.