On Audiobooks & Memory

People like to argue on the internet about whether or not audiobooks count as reading. There are people who don’t think that other people should listen to audiobooks, or that, if those people do listen to audiobooks, they shouldn’t consider it reading. There are people who call it “cheating.” There are people who say things like “listening to an audiobook is easier than reading a book” or “that’s not real reading.”

I’m not going to rehash the arguments on either side of this debate. What I am going to do is offer an argument I haven’t seen before: that one of the things I like about reading audiobooks is the way they sear themselves into my memory alongside the experiences I have while reading them.

This is something you can’t fully experience with a paper book or e-book. You might read a book on vacation or during a rainy day or when it’s snowing out and that will affect how the book holds itself in your memory, but it heightens with audio.

It goes in both ways. When I think of planting my vegetable garden I think of The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre and the death of one particular character at the end of the novel. And when I think of The Honourable Schoolboy, I think of my vegetable garden. Roddy Doyle’s Love brings me to planting ferns along the fence. Thinking of Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy brings me to shoveling the driveway and sidewalk of our apartment building in uptown Minneapolis (I got a discount on rent for shoveling.) Scott Brick’s voice narrated every act of shoveling.

An audiobook I recommend you check out (although you should start with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

The Left Hand of Darkness is forever associated with commutes through the snow by bicycle, fitting when you consider the last act of that novel. Although there is another Ursula leGuin not read by audio that takes me to specific places: The Wizard of Earthsea reminds me of a vacation in the Pacific Northwest.

This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith correlates in my mind with walks around the Lake of the Isles during the early pandemic; also, early in the pandemic, I painted the walls of the living room of our new house to James Franco reading Stephen King’s The Dead Zone; later that summer, I walked through the avenues of our new neighborhood listening to CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. There’s one house I walked past that still makes me think of the JFK chapters of that book.

I don’t think you can have this exact experience with a paper book. And for those people who think audiobooks don’t count, that’s okay. I value these memories and the way the books will forever be connected to them.