For about the past seven years, I’ve been pretty exclusively an audiobook reader. Not by choice: changes in a disability made it impossible for me to read with my eyes for long periods of time. I had eye surgery earlier this year, and I’ve been dipping my eyeballs back into reading text, but I’ve gotten attached to the habit of audiobooks, particularly combined with walking, crafting, chores, or painting!
Audiobooks have many skeptics. One of the most common comments I hear about audiobooks is that they aren’t good for complex plots or world building. People are often surprised that I listen pretty exclusively to mystery, fantasy, or historical monographs. And I get it: when I was flung from the realm of reading text, I struggled as well, particularly with nonfiction, and particularly with speed. I’d been a lifelong but casual audiobook fan, a roadtrip listener. But here’s the thing: listening to a book or an article is a skill, and if that’s your only option, it’s one that you develop mighty fast. I think people forget that reading text is a skill, and literacy and comprehension both vary depending on myriad factors. It may seem counterintuitive to call aural comprehension a similar skill–most people are born hearing–but I personally have experienced a growth in what I can only call aural literacy.
While I’m not as good at listening at higher speeds as people who were born with visual impairment, I can do it. It’s not a brag, but just a fact, that I’ve gotten better at aural comprehension, concentration, and memory. Casual listeners (like I used to be) often can’t fathom being able to follow a mystery plot in audio unless it’s in a relatively sensory-deprived setting like driving a car, and for sure different people have different neurological baselines that make some things easier or harder. But it is possible to improve and strengthen aural comprehension and memory to the point that following a mystery plot is perfectly natural. If the ability to solve whodunnits is any sort of barometer, for me, I’m as good or better at listening as I used to be at reading text!
Of course, there are some areas where audiobooks are simply not going to ever stand up. I miss out on all visual clues from golden age mysteries. If there’s a map, I don’t know it. Recently, when I was listening to Have His Carcass, the audiobook fully cut out the lengthy deduction jam Harriet and Peter have over the cypher. The audiobook editors kindly included it in an appendix, but I didn’t feel compelled to listen. I’ll power through information that doesn’t lend itself well to audio if I need it during my studies or for work, but I felt no great loss fully skipping that section of the book. Not all deductive elements are so easily excised, though, and if my primary goal in reading mysteries was trying to solve puzzles, I’d certainly suffer. I also don’t know how to spell any character’s names! When I found out how "Eyelesbarrow" was spelled, I was shocked.
The quality of an audiobook is a more serious problem. While I’ve learned to just deal with readers who I dislike, that doesn’t always work. There are narrators whose style I dislike so much that I won’t read a book if they do it. And I’ve run into problems when a narrator switches mid series: I’ve stalled out on Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series because of a narrator switch mid series (though I’ve every intention to return and finish it up some day). I particularly dislike when a single narrator tries to overly gender different characters–the male narrator trying, very badly, to do women’s voices is the wall I ran into with the switch in In a Dry Season (a book I would otherwise have relished, since I adore cold cases and ghost towns!). Accents can range from laughably bad to wincingly offensive. And in mysteries, sometimes they’re a little spoiled by narrators who over-emphasize elements that are meant to be subtle clues. However, a good narrator can be an absolute joy, and may even transform and elevate a book. Someday I may write about some of my specific favorite narrators and what they offer; I’ve been thinking about it a lot in relation to my Sayers reread.
It’s not just the narrator that can be an issue. Authorial tics, like repetitive phrases or sentence structure, can be more prominent and annoying to me in audio. Things that I might glide over in text stand out, and if I’m not otherwise enjoying a book a lot, can kill it for me. Though not related to bad writing exactly, I had this problem recently with Iain Banks’ Rebus: in the early books, there are a lot of …. weird (to put it mildly).... sexual comments, including about Rebus’ own daughter. (I'm not sure if this continues beyond the early books, because I put them down for now). Maybe I was just not a very literate reader of text, but that is the type of thing that I could see myself just gliding past. In audio, it stands out, and it’s hard to overlook when I’m constantly on edge wondering if there’s going to be an uncomfortable paragraph about how all cops are turned on by corpses or whatever.
There’s a flip side to this sensitivity, though: I find myself more appreciative of beautiful writing and subtle characteristics, and of humor! Agatha Christie is often given short shrift as a writer; I think everyone just accepts that she was not as good of a stylist as Sayers or others. And by some metrics, that is true, especially for Christie’s lesser books. But rereading them through audio has encouraged me to notice when her writing is lovely, when her observations are particularly surprising or sharp, or when her characterization is particularly interesting or heartbreaking. Christie isn’t given credit for how subtle and deep her characterization and human observations can be, but I think these things particularly stand out in the audio format. Humor also comes through for me more in audio! I couldn’t get into Terry Pratchett until I started listening to the audiobooks, and I think how funny Christie can be often shines under Suchet and Fraser’s narrations.
Unfortunately, the biggest and most insurmountable problem with audiobooks is availability. I haven’t read any of the lesser known authors from the mid 20th century because they aren’t recorded and they aren’t public domain. Like many people, I have issues with generative AI, but not for accessibility purposes. I’ve used text to speech in academia/work, but I haven’t found the versions that are cost-effective are good enough quality for my fiction taste. If I just need the information, I don’t mind having a robot read to me. But I read fiction for enjoyment, and the jankiness of AI narration makes it impossible for me to enjoy an audiobook read by a robot the same way I do the ones read by humans. Having all these previously inaccessible books open to me is one of the areas I’ve been most excited about post surgery.
To close this out, here are some of my favorite books that I’ve recently enjoyed for their qualities as audiobooks:
- Ian Carmichael’s reading of the Lord Peter series are a delight! They deserve their own essay but I really love his character-ful readings. Five Red Herrings was an improvement on the book, whose written dialect I remember finding very difficult to get through.
- Janice Hallet’s The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels felt like it was made for audio! This is a great example of different narrators coming together to create something more like an audioplay than a book.
- I love all the Christie audiobooks, but I recently listened to Hugh Fraser's rendition of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and thought it was particularly good. Fraser gives a real performance instead of just narration, and it was a bit like reading the book for the first time to meet his version of Dr. Shepherd.
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