Just Press Play

Neil Gaiman Explores the World of Audiobooks for NPR Interviews David Sedaris and others

Neil Gaiman, the prolific, charming, hunky author and sometimes narrator of his own work on audio, offered up a wonderful love letter to the audiobook this morning [11/30/2009] on the "Open Mic" segment of NPR's Morning Edition. If you missed it, you can listen to the story online as well as hear extended segments not included in this morning's broadcast.

In the course of the piece, Gaiman speaks with author (and narrator of his own works) David Sedaris, veteran narrator Martin Jarvis, and Don Katz, founder of Audible.com. Sedaris, as usual, is hilarious in his send-up of the type of narrator that he doesn't much care for.

Gaiman asks if listening to audiobooks is the same thing as reading, and concludes that it's not. "An audiobook," he says, "is its own thing, a unique medium that goes in through the ear."

An aspect of the story to which I personally related was Gaiman's reminiscence of the audiobooks of his childhood, including the 1954 Caedmon recording of Dylan Thomas narrating Under Milkwood. Stuff like that loomed very large in my own childhood.

By the way, Playaway currently offers two Neil Gaiman titles: M is for Magic (narrated by the author) and Interworld (written with Michael Reaves and narrated by Christopher Evan Welch). And you'll find three more Gaiman books on Playaway, available from Recorded Books.

From David Sedaris, Playaway offers Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and When You Are Engulfed in Flames, both narrated by the author.

---

Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Sr. Manager for Content Strategy

Mary Burkey on Audio Literacy

I've been bugging my friend Mary Burkey about whether anyone recorded her wonderful remarks on audio literacy during a panel discussion on "Multiple Literacies" at this summer's ALA annual meeting in Chicago. Unfortunately, no recording was made. (Mary's trusty digital recorder, which she often carries with her, was on loan to someone else who was capturing another session.)

From memory then, here are some of the points I recall her making from her perspective as an educator and a fan of audiobooks:

* Listening is not cheating -- it's an alternate way to experience a literary work.

* Audiobook listening expands listening skills. For most of human history, people lived in a "culture of orality". Storytelling, oral communication, and listening are central to our makeup as human beings. But not everyone is equally good at listening -- in fact, for some students it's really difficult. Like all skills, it requires practice.

* Audiobook listening increases language fluency for both struggling and proficient readers. The listener hears language as it is actually spoken, and, in the process, is exposed to correct pronunciation, new vocabulary, and new forms of speech. When you listen, you hear punctuation and enunciation being modeled. A great way to learn about the fluidity of written language is to listen to it.

* Audiobook listening can raise reading comprehension. Students can usually comprehend about 2 years beyond their reading level. English-language learners often hear and comprehend better than they can speak. By allowing struggling readers an alternate path into a book, an audiobook can help them take in its meaning. Listening gives struggling readers or readers of challenging material a helping hand, "carrying them across" the spots where they might stumble with the printed page (think of the many German phrases in The Book Thief).

* Gifted readers often devour books, but they don't necessarily remember the details. Some gifted kids like to listen to audio as a way to make themselves slow down and take in the details of what they gulped in print. ("Gulpers" don't necessarily learn to pronounce the words they read.)

* When we share literature with kids, what do we do?  We read to them. Often the works that are read to students are filtered through the voices of their predominantly female teachers. One way to get boys more engaged with the listening/reading experience is to give them characters that sound the way they were written to be -- voiced by professional narrators and even full casts.

* Listening can help build attention spans -- audiobooks teach "long-form listening in a snippet world."

Mary tells me that she made some of these same points during her remarks at yet another session in which she participated in Chicago, this one on "Evaluating Audiobooks for Children and Teens". She did record the audio for that session, and it can be found, along with the session PowerPoint, on her Audiobooker blog at:

     http://audiobooker.booklistonline.com/2009/07/20/evaluating-audiobooks-on-audio/

Some Thoughts on Verlyn Klinkenborg on Reading Aloud

In case you missed it, here's Verlyn Klinkenborg's "editorial observer" piece from this past Saturday's New York Times, entitled "Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud."

Popular as it has become, "listening aloud," as Klinkenborg calls it, "isn't the same as reading aloud."  In the same way that we as a culture have largely abandoned the practice of making our own music in favor of listening to recordings made by professional musicians, we have given up the experience of reading out loud and outsourced it to the pros.

“Listening aloud,” says Klinkenborg,
“isn't the same as reading aloud...”

In the brief 700-word piece, Klinkenborg  makes some complicated and interesting assertions about the meaning of words not just as representations of a writer's intentions but also as having a life of their own as they pass through the body (and soul!) of someone reading aloud.  Heavy.

I have a couple of thoughts about this:

First, I like both to listen and to read out loud, although I think I prefer the later.  I listen mostly as a matter of convenience, very seldom to hear a particular narrator's performance.  Mostly I listen for professional reasons, or to make the most of my drive time, or to keep me entertained in the kitchen.  I read to my wife.  I read to my 18-year-old daughter on the rare occasion when she'll let me. And, as Klinkenborg suggests, my experience of a written work is quite different when I read it aloud.  When you let the words do the work for you, something powerful happens.

Second, I'd probably like listening to professional audiobooks better if they were produced to a higher standard.  Though there are a lot of talented audiobook readers in the business these days, sadly, many of the productions that come my way are good but not great.  In many of the works I listen to, there are at least a few serious mis-readings that make me cringe and wish that there had been a director to stop and ask the narrator to read it once more, "but this time, with the emphasis here not there." 

We don't talk about this much in the audiobook industry, but many productions are recorded without benefit of any direction at all, often by a narrator working alone from a home studio.

So we have indeed outsourced our reading out loud, but not necessarily to the same extent that we've outsourced our musical production or to the same caliber of professionals.  According to Klinkenborg, just as with music, we have lost the ability to let the work come out of ourselves, speak through us, affect us.

At 700 words, Klinkenborg's piece is really only a sketch.  For rhetorical purposes, he's forced to overstate his case slightly, but the ideas he puts forth are subtle and complicated.   His reflections on the written word and the spoken word are worth thinking about -- not just in passing, but in depth.  I recommend reading the whole piece through at least a couple of times -- maybe even out loud.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

BTW, the Tantor Audio production of Verlyn Klinkenborg's latest book, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile is available on Playaway.