How I fell for audiobooks...

I first got into audiobooks out of shame. Previously, I believed my attention didn’t work in the right way for them. If I listened to long podcasts on a walk, I was too prone to getting distracted by my own thoughts or by what was going on around me. Unlike when your mind wanders while reading a book, it’s a pain in the arse to try to scroll back through a podcast to find where you were before you fell off.

The shame came in when I was playing a lot of video games a few years ago. That pursuit ramped up—no surprise—during the pandemic. Intellectually, I would argue pretty vigorously that putting gaming into the “bad leisure pursuit” box and reading into the “good” one is wrong-headed. It depends on the game and on the book, and on what culture has decided is high and low, all of that. Besides, I write video games, so I can claim with some justification that time spent gaming is useful professional development rather than pure distraction. Yet, still, the heart feels differently; I experience a creeping guilt and self-disgust if I reckon I’ve been playing games for too long. So I worked out a hack to suppress that feeling: I could play video games so long as I was also listening to an audiobook. To maximise the sense that I was using my time in some kind of worthy, admirable way, I went in at the deep end in terms of my book choices: enormously long works of classic literature. Who could begrudge me time spent “reading” those? Who could see me, controller in hand, melted into a sofa in a dark room under a layer of Quavers dust, and say that I was squandering my one precious life when I was also working my way through Crime and Punishment?

It’s led to some strange neural links. Middlemarch will forever be associated with Zelda now. There’s an incongruous flavour of space exploration to The Count of Monte Cristo because I was playing Outer Wilds at the same time. Amazing book, that one. Astonishing that a 1,000-page book can feel so gripping. I count it as one of my favourites now. Would I ever have got around to reading it in physical form? Probably not. The sheer mass of the thing in a book shop would have spooked me. But “learning”, if that’s what I was doing, to read audiobooks has also unlocked much more reading time in my day. Doing chores, going to the shops, interstitial minutes spent walking between places I have to be: it turns out all of these are moments I can be spending reading. As a result, I’ve read about twice as many books this year as I read in any given year before my great audiobook revolution.

Something is lost when you listen to a book rather than read, I think. When I read a hard-copy book, I write down phrases that I want to remember for their beauty or insight. I don’t do that for audiobooks. That depth of engagement with a writer’s craft at a word level is not available to me when I’m listening, for whatever reason. But I have come across audiobooks so well performed that they enrich the reading experience. Audiobooks read by Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Jeremy Irons, Chiwetel Ejiofor, the list goes on.

There are treats to be found from less well-known names, too. If you go on Audible, there are a number of options for Moby Dick. I once tried reading Moby Dick in hard copy. I got about 200 pages in and was enjoying it, and then, as so often happens with long reading projects, I got distracted by work commitments, and subsequently felt I had left it too long to go back in where I left off, so I abandoned it.

Enter William Hootkins. You may think you do not know who William Hootkins is, but you might simply not recognise his name. Google him, and see if you get the “Oh, him!” feeling that I did. He’s that one guy from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

He also performed an audiobook of Moby Dick in 2004. The book runs to over 24 hours, and I could have taken a further 24 easily. Hootkins is a master chameleon, able to manipulate his voice in a thousand different ways to inhabit each of the characters. He brings out the sarcasm, the humour, the pathos, all of it so brilliantly. How he was able to make me laugh out loud simply by the way he pronounces the word “Ramadan” is beyond me. How annoying that I now have to go around earnestly recommending a day-long recording of notoriously baggy behemoth, Moby Dick, as one of the finest performances I’ve experienced in any medium—but there we go.

All of which is to say that you should listen to audiobooks. Even if you are someone who thinks, as I did once, that they won’t work for you. Private performances of some of the best books ever written by the greatest actors of our time are available, right now, on your phone. What a world!