Writes Frank Bruni, in his newsletter (NYT gift link).
He describes his vision problem: "Almost nine years ago, I had a stroke that ravaged the optic nerve behind my right eye and rendered that eye pretty much useless. I wrote about that in this 2018 essay.... Since the incident, my slightly off-kilter monocular vision hasn’t deteriorated further.... [There is a] gap between what each of us struggles with and what the people in our orbits know or see of it.... It’s the source of so much ignorance, insensitivity and even cruelty."
(If you click through to the newsletter, you'll see the headline is "Buttigieg and El-Sayed Are Teaching Democrats to Speak Republican." You might want to read that. I did, but then I didn't want to blog about it... and did want to blog about the old audiobooks issue, even though I've blogged it many times before, as a click on my "audiobooks" tag will prove.)
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59 comments:
What victim thing happened to his taste buds that wrecked his dining reviewer gig?
I have glaucoma that limits peripheral vision in my left eye, making me vulnerable to being t-boned on a left turn across traffic. My full self driving Tesla Model 3 functions as a medical prosthesis, and keeps me and other people safe. Passed my DMV vision test, but it’s the self driving that keeps me working and mobile.
"Buttigieg and El-Sayed Are Teaching Democrats to Speak Republican."
As if by learning to speak "Dog," you can persuade Fido to like you dog food.
This is one of those things where I wonder why people have “opinions” on it. It’s really just preferences. Not everything requires an opinion. I’ve never been into audio books much. But…I’m a believer in people listening to scripture at church rather than reading. Much ancient writing was designed for oral delivery. I’m starting to consider more audiobooks…I find listening to something (not music) while working on projects, such as house cleaning, helps. I don’t think I can sit and listen like I can sit and read, though.
The collective elite D-left - not only a crime syndicate - they are a deception + grift scam.
Audiobooks add the interpretation of the lector to the mix, to replace the internal voice of the reader of text.
Just as tcrosse says. But Bruni is right, they are god-send for those with poor vision.
Generally the technology based interpretations of literature dampens and narrows the receiver's imaginative interpretation. This goes all the way back to the the birth of moving pictures. Yet, starting centuries before, the innovations of Michangelo and all opened things up.
I have always liked the feel (and smell) of a physical book. My problem is, I have a hard time getting rid of books that I like. After filling up several rooms of bookcases, I began to see the value of having them on my Kindle or as an audiobook.
The audiobooks are great to listen to while I'm driving, walking, or cooking. I am not worried about the audiobook misrepresenting the author, at least with current ones because the author can have some control over the narration. I know some authors work closely with their narrators. With older books, if the authors are dead, how can you say your interpretation of an author's words is more accurate than the narrator's?
That's not to say there aren't some pretty bad narrators out there. I have my favorites (I'll buy books based only on those narrators reading them), but there are some others that I just can't listen to.
It makes me want to puke every time I hear some weak ass. Bitch use a bad experience in their life to guilt other people for their opinions on matters of little to no importance.
Mmm... clam *chider*.
Thanks for that, Thomas. My own brother Thomas had a stroke 9 months ago and messed up the vision in his right eye and he's getting a fully self-driving Tesla shortly in order to keep himself mobile. He had basically quit driving and started using Uber and friends to get to doctor's appointments in the grocery store. I went out and visited him in May and sat in the right seat while he drove his Jeep Rubicon for the first time in 6 months. Psychologically that was the best medicine he had ever had since his heart attack and stroke.
It's so important to maintain your Independence, good job
💪😎🤙
Ok so some people cant read well and need audiobooks. Thanks for sharing Frank. We feel sorry for you. Happy?
Going on to the issue of listening v. Reading it depends on what you're reading. Most poetry before 1900 was meant to be read. Some 20th century stuff is meant to be read.
And I cant imagine many people think you need to read non-fiction to truly "get it". That leaves some novels.
As for "Lingering over the words" - you can always punch the rewind button. And speech is so much slower than reading, you're in effect "lingering" over the words as you listen.
I was laid up for a couple weeks with no access to books. Or rather given my injury I couldn't have read comfortably. Thank God I had my Cellphone with audiobooks on it. Its the only way I could have gotten through "From here to eternity". And I enjoyed it a lot.
My experience is that big thick novels by great authors are the best ones for audiobooks. They write well, so you can listen to the great language, and you can do something other than sit in a chair, so its not so difficult to get through 400 or more pages.
If listening to great authors adds to the enjoyment. Listening to mediocre ones is almost intolerable. That's especially true if they have a tick of repeating words or padding their stories. "Red Shirts" by Scalzi was a perfect example. The guy tacked on "He said" or "X said" to almost every piece of dialogue. Listening to that 500 times was sheer torture.
I begrudge nobody their audiobooks. Honestly, I don't care either way.
For me, I've always been a lightning fast reader, though I'm a little slower now due to vision issues and the surgery I had. The reason I dislike audiobooks **for me** is that I dislike the pace being dictated by someone else. I have my own paces, and they vary. So I stick with physical books (or Kindle would be OK, I just don't happen to use it very much).
Also, if one enjoys marginalia, which I sometimes do, it doesn't feel "natural"--again, to me and for me, only--to try and replicate that with audio.
I say, "Whatever floats your boat!" I'm just happy that people are still consuming books.
Regarding "teaching Democrats to speak Republican", this is a leftist fantasy that has been around all my life. See, it is not the substance or what we say, it's the narrative. People who don't vote for democrats are mental midgets who, if you speak to them in just the right way will follow you like a puppy.
Close reading is a valuable part of college training, but it becomes a disease afterwards. Eventually, you just want to get the story and not feel like you have to analyze everything.
Books get easier and easier to put down or just not pick up, and one appreciates a reader to take one through a book that one otherwise wouldn't start or wouldn't finish.
I'm not sure that the issue is "speaking" other people's language .
It seems to me that the skill that needs improving is ***listening,*** really absorbing what someone else is saying, rather than immediately thinking more about one's own response.
My two cents.
I would say, Mamdani does a good job of communicating, whether one likes his message or not. So does AOC. Buttigieg and El-Sayed not so much. When I say Mamdani and AOC communicate, I'm not talking about giving accurate information, but about connecting with an audience. El-Sayed is turning his whole state against him, and Buttigieg leaves most people cold.
Maybe this is an odd thing: But part of my components of reading is that I often "hear" the words in the act of "reading" them. Maybe that's part of the reason that I find audiobooks distracting and a bit off-putting.
Even as a small child, though I adored books, I didn't much like being "read to." My mom used to marvel at this. And she, like me, thought that this is part of way I taught myself to read by pre-school. (We didn't have preschool, by the way, and kindergarten wasn't even mandatory, but I'm using it only for timeline purposes.) So, it could just be the way I'm wired.
I disliked "reading hours" at the library. My mom always reminded me that I was not allowed to read during them.
This still makes me laugh, heartily.
I don't even try to read whole books anymore. One hundred percent Audible. I read online and then, only shorter stuff. ADHD maybe. My mind wanders off the page of a book.
Our minds act as modems. A hidden signal can be embedded in a carrier, as well as codes, in a subliminal message to influence our perception and understanding. Audio is another channel and opportunity, if not merely a means of corruption. Some people, under some circumstances, in some situations, may be less capable of filtering, decoding and more vulnerable to influence.
My wife and I enjoy long road trips. Audio books are perfect entertainment for a full day of driving.
"When I’ve alluded to my penchant for audiobooks... I’ve occasionally been chided and told that they’re bastardizations of the real thing, and that printed volumes are truer to an author’s intent….”
Well, for some reason The Odyssey often comes up in conversation lately. For several centuries after Homer ‘wrote’ it, it was only available in audio format, so that is probably closer to the ‘real thing’.
For me audio is too slow and linear. I like being able to go as fast or slow as I want, flip back and forth to check something or refresh my memory, etc. Also, for me audio seems to go in one ear and out the other. Reading leaves much more of an impression.
“But do the evangelists of that religion pause to wonder why we heretics exist?” Nice to read a sentence with that definition of religion: A belief system held by faith and ardor. Not held by facts or science but by an undebatable faith.
Also, I haven’t bought a physical book in many years. When I want a book I want it on my screen, and I want it now. Books that aren’t on Kindle are dead to me.
@rcommal Yes!! They don't listen.
I've never been able to warm to the Kindle format. It's ok for fiction, but I read little of that. For science, I frequently find myself going back and rereading sections and I find that much easier with a physical book.
Recently, Amazon appears to have redone the Kindle interface on the iPad and I hate it. For starters, I can no longer determine which books are downloaded onto my device and which are not; they appear to have removed that ability. And where previously my books were presented to me in a simple list, now it's all a mess of big-icon book covers and apparently two categories of "read" and "unread". I'm having difficulty finding anything.
I get the "don't see well" part. I had stroke, about a year ago, that left me unable to read. I was glad to find a few audiobooks to keep me going. I read all the time. Hours every day. Never was a TV guy. Well, not an all day hours at a time TV guy anyway.
I had to re-learn how to read. at first when I'd get to the end of a line and scan back to the beginning of the next line the words would run off the page and my eye would keep following them. Very unhandy. I found the hard dark brown edges on my Kindle paperwhite were the best. My eye would poick up the hard dark edge and I'd know to stop following the moving print. It's very hard to put into words. Slowly I re-trained my brain to read. It took a few months. I was happy during those early days to have some entertainment in the form of audio books. I think the first book I listened to was something by Elmore Leonard about a guy called Stick. He was a low life that robbed grocery stores and gas stations for a living. I liked the narrator's style. I can't remember who it was now but he was good at it.
Shouting Thomas, I just read your post about your vision problems. I have stroke caused hemi-anopea.
There's no vision in either eye to the left of center but I do see everything right of center. Both eyes work fine but the brain tissue that processes the data is gone. I've been considering a self driving Tesla. Like you, I feel I could drive but I fear turning left might cause me to run over a kid on a bike or a pedestrian in the crosswalk. Can you tell me how you went about getting your license? Are you able to get insurance?
I'm very seriously interested. I'll check back.
I don’t have much to add to the audiobook debate. It is just an opinion, which is like assholes. IMO, I have more time available to listen to audiobooks, so I do.
The author interpretation reminds me of an issue with a particular video game in which the developers are pissed that the gamers play it differently than they envisioned. They’ve made millions, because people buy the game and play with in the rules the games provides. It is marketed as open world, so why wouldn’t those interested play in an open world manner? Alas, the developers don’t like it, so they keep making it less open, and not just lose sells but alienate those that enjoyed the work until now.
Anyway… I doubt Orwell would appreciate Andy Serkis interpretation of “Animal Farm” even if he predicted such interpretations.
Author Larry Correia has said that he deliberately writes his books in a manner such that they will "sound good" when read out as an audiobook.
“Audiobooks add the interpretation of the lector to the mix, to replace the internal voice of the reader of text.”
Very true. I’ve read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a dozen times since I was 13 years-old. I was pleasantly surprised how “reading” it as an audiobook added new context and texture to the story.
As with podcasts the voice and style of the presenter is very important. The best material can be rendered unlistenable if the presenter is repellent.
I've noticed that there is a bit of a snobbery issue in the online, book reading community these days. I keep seeing posts about "Reading has become performative" and "Listening to audio books isn't really reading." Obviously, an audio book is a different kind of experience from reading a book; but if you enjoy it, it's good for you. As I've said before, people need to stop caring so much about what other people think about them. Now an extension to that would be that people need to stop caring so much about other what other people are caring about. Why waste your time with stuff like this when you could be enjoying a good book?
I think that the two are different experiences, but I wouldn’t place one as more legitimate than the other. So much of writing was intended to be read aloud, it seems like quite a recent invention to think that only physical reading “counts”.
Personally I’ve found rereading Cormac McCarthy on audiobook helped me appreciate the rhythms of his sentences. This becomes obvious when you think about how different a poor audiobook reader is versus a good one. As listener you are being led into an interpretation of character and atmosphere.
Dont we all "allude to our penchant"?
I did it three times yesterday.
“ Recently, Amazon appears to have redone the Kindle interface on the iPad and I hate it. For starters, I can no longer determine which books are downloaded onto my device and which are not; they appear to have removed that ability. And where previously my books were presented to me in a simple list, now it's all a mess of big-icon book covers and apparently two categories of "read" and "unread". I'm having difficulty finding anything.”
Hmm. I’m using Kindle on iPad right now, and I seem to have the latest version. All those options are still there, you just have to click the little thingies at the upper left or right to see them.
Someone upthread made a good point. A drawback to audiobooks is the narrator. Sometimes they add a lot to the book. For example, there was a guy called "Walter Zimmermann" who did books on tapes years ago, and he was the perfect voice for old Russian novels. He did a great job with the pickwick papers too.
And Scott Brick's reading of "White Jazz" was a tour de force.
Unfortunately, the narrator can be so poor its distracting and can even make the book unlistenable. I'm talking fiction. Non-fiction gives a lot more lattitude to who can read the book in a satisfactory manner.
And then there's the "woman problem". Books by male authors often have a large amount devoted to female characters (cf: Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary) - so you have choice of female narrator doing the female voices well and the other stuff badly. Or a male narrator doing the opposite.
For a while audible or some other company was doing "affirmative action" for female narrators and giving them classics written by men. Probably to attract women buyers. "Oh i guess I'll try the sun also rises. It seemed too macho, but there's female narrator so it might be OK".
They seemed to stop doing it. Or maybe Im just not looking hard enough.
The disability is orthogonal to the argument. He could have easily lamented his inability to read the authors work and confirmed the claim if he believed it.
"Going on to the issue of listening v. Reading it depends on what you're reading. Most poetry before 1900 was meant to be read. Some 20th century stuff is meant to be read."
Whoops. Meant to write "Most poetry before 1900 was meant to be read OUT LOUD."
Theodore Roosevelt mentions in one of his letters that he and some college friends got together one night and spent the evening reading poetry out loud to each other.
That's just what peeps did back then, before the invention of the I-phone.
Love this nugget:
**"Buttigieg and El-Sayed Are Teaching Democrats to Speak Republican." You might want to read that. I did, but then I didn't want to blog about it.**
The idea is absurd. Althouse's dismissal is nuff said.
I have strong myopia, astigmatism, cataracts, and developing macular degeneration on one eye. With glasses, reading books was never a problem. But the last time I was in Oxford I visited the Ashmolean and the lighting was so dim I could barely make out the objects, never mind the placards. The lights were dim even on the stone artifacts. Flashlights were verboten. I literally cried in frustration.
I had my cataracts removed, and my sight is like I am thirty again. Nice. Seven minutes under the knife for each eye, isn't modern medicine nifty?
I can't listen to audiobooks, and most documentaries bore me. Too slow.
(I'm acquainted with a founder at a company that specializes in museum lighting, specifically sensitive-artifact lights. Maybe I'll give him a ring...)
The Buttigieg article was just an updated version of the old "If you were a real Christian, you'd vote for the Democrats." Now we get: "if you were a real Christian, you'd vote for the socialists because they'll seize all you have, and give it to the poor and then you can follow Christ to be crucified." But it kind of merged in with the comments on Audible. Recognizing similarities is quite different for me when I am listening to a speech versus reading the same words. I'm much slower to link what I hear with what I have heard than to link what I read with what I have read. And political speeches tend to concentrate very heavily on what has been said, so I think I'm not the only one who processes the heard word more slowly than the written word. Anyhow, the result is that I don't listen to audible books - I can't really quite keep with them because I keep leaping ahead.
If the book is importent I will buy both kindle and the audiobook.
I read it and the a week or two later I will listen. I find the combination enhances my understanding of the material.
Whats wrong with. ?
I am holding out hope for NeuraLink by the time I'll need it for my vision. My mother is nearly blind now at 81, and my dad isn't a ton better at 83.
I also use audiobooks because I have found that I actually retain more of the story/information from listening than I do looking at words on a page. Wild what you find out about yourself after many many years.
Mr. Bruni is certainly welcome to audiobooks and I am happy he has been able to deal with his vision issues. But God help us if any of our personal preferences in another area ever runs afoul of his.
I don't make as many long drives as I used to, and there are now lots of very good podcasts available, but audiobooks are a godsend for those long drives.
The narrator does make a huge difference. I listened to Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" narrated by an actual Brit while driving from Connecticut to North Carolina and back. Wonderful. Then I listened to Bryson himself narrating one of his books (I forget which) with his phony British accent, and it was awful.
There are several narrations of the Patrick O'Brien Aubrey/Maturin series. Listening to Patrick Tull is like watching a play with excellent actors--wonderful! Others not so much.
Ah, Frank Bruni. Never gives credit to his far better co-auothor Elinor Burkett, who did the real work. Who is a liberal centrist but was cancel-cultured when she told the truth about Fauci in the 80's, Columbine, and Communist dictatorships and Islam. While being very wry. Then some infantile black guy tried to take credit for her decades of film work in Africa and made her a laughing stock on some awards show by stealing her work, which she resisted on air, but finally won. Grab her books as fast as you can. They are disappearing. Best long-form journalism of the modern age. Someone with power needs to get them reproduced. The Kids are Alright. The Gravest Show on Earth. An American Woman in all the Wrong Places.
My family has a history of eye problems. So, I'm glad Audio Books are around. My objection the article is the the typical "Hey, don't criticize X, it helps people who have ABC condition" tone of the NYT's article.
This cripples all discourse and is used dishonestly by the MSM to manipulate us.
Why are you opposing XYZ? It helps the X "Community" you bastard?
See how what a weapon that is?
"Hmm. I’m using Kindle on iPad right now, and I seem to have the latest version. All those options are still there, you just have to click the little thingies at the upper left or right to see them."
OK, I found the List/Grid selection. It still insists on separate categories for "Read" and "Unread", which is annoying but I can live with. (Kindle is too paternalistic; I don't need a pat on the back for having read X number of books). But my biggest gripe remains; it tells me the total number of books downloaded, but I see no designations for which are and are not. They used to have separate lists for those, which *was* useful.
In general, I hate softheads mucking with interfaces just because they need something to do. My physical books don't reformat themselves sitting on the shelf.
And get off my lawn!
And why is Bruni selfishily driving long distances with damaged vision? Selfish narcissist, always has been.
In fairness to Bruni, he's always alluded to his penchant for driving recklessly.
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