Posted on July 13, 2018 at 2:00 PM by Jeffrey Bruner
Like many of us readers, Alex Clark was a lifelong lover of words on a page, not on a tape or disc.
It wasn’t a rejection of audiobooks, period, but simply a passionate preference for the act of reading.
Yet she found herself recently pressed for time and in need of re-reading a book for a guest appearance on a podcast.
So what did she do? Again, like many of us, she decided to make efficient use of time in a car, and popped in the audiobook.
Clark, in The Guardian, called the experience a revelation. She said of a particular passage:
This is beautiful on the page, but listening to (narrator Emilia) Fox savor the words, conjuring perfectly the narrator’s ambiguous blend of trepidation and desire, added another dimension. It did not dilute my reading experience, but rather enriched it.
It was a far cry, as she observed, from the days of multiple discs and cassettes — no wonder the medium has caught on, particularly among commuters.
But Clark wanted to quantify, as best as she could, how listening versus reading altered our perceptions of a story.
You can read what she found on The Guardian’s website.