Is listening ‘reading’?

No, but it keeps me awake and ultimately, does it matter if I'm engaging with literature by ear or by sight

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I used to read like a house on fire. Then cable TV appeared, and the banquet of classic movies lured me in.

The internet continued to diminish my once-robust reading habit, and social media swallowed gobs of life I’ll never get back.

To top it off, “The Pause” shot further holes in my attention span. Who knew that a 350-page book could function as a sleeping pill for a woman of a certain age?

Now that I’m driving across the state “on the regular” to visit kids and grandbabies, I’m listening to books, and thankfully, that doesn’t put me to sleep. It also helps break up the long stretches of open country on Highway 20.

People like to debate that listening to an audiobook is not reading, and technically, they are correct, but since the dawn of time before ANYONE could read, people sat around a fire and listened to stories.

Years ago, I read Walter Ong’s book, “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,” which is a great read. Listening is not reading per se, but I know several couples who read to each other, and for me, that’s the perfect marriage between orality and literacy. For the sake of argument (and the sake of this column), let’s say they are two sides of the same coin.

As far as literacy is concerned, I’m grateful that publishing has been blown apart in the last 40 years. Although I appreciated reading fiction by John Updike, John Cheever, John Irving, and Saul Bellow, they were urbanites, mostly from the Northeast. Even the seminal female poets, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton hailed from there. They were also all white, all upper-middle class writers. Publishers decided that they spoke for all of us.

Now, we have voices like Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, and so many others to show us a wider range of human experience. As American culture has shifted, today’s American writers depict a country that is no longer self-satisfied and materially sated. The voices and experiences we can now read range far and wide.

Now, literature gives us the stranger and the outcast struggling to breathe free, and readers are the better for it. Wally Lamb’s newest book, “The River is Waiting” introduces readers to an unemployed father who uses drugs to cope. He ends up in prison after accidentally killing his son.

I have watched some dark, Scandinavian series on Netflix, but listening to one particular chapter in Lamb’s book was almost unbearable. I almost quit, but it was for book club, and in the end, I’m glad I persisted.

I also just finished “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver, and it takes the main elements of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” and transposes them into modern-day Appalachia. If you know nothing about the opioid crisis in that part of the country, this book will more than fill in the gaps.

This Pulitzer Prize winner is full of heartbreak, but it’s also full of wry observations about human nature, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny, too.

Both books tell gripping stories of an America in decline. In other words, they reflect life for those who are not bright and shiny and flush with cash. Increasingly, this is a growing reality for many Americans.

In fiction, there must be redemption, and in both novels, artistic expression is the means to transcend their personal demons. What an unexpected joy to learn that in each story, educators encourage the main character to pursue their art. In “The River is Waiting” it’s a librarian; in “Demon Copperhead” it’s a teacher.

So, yes, the world that the literary greats of the 1970s explored is gone. What we now have in published storytelling is wider, deeper, and grittier, and it’s the truth we live now, and thank goodness authors can tell these stories. Thank goodness we still have the freedom to read them.