Road trip and crime thriller set in HELSINKI and rural FINLAND
Audio books versus printed books
18th November 2019
I recently started a new book club with some friends of mine – really a nice excuse to get together in autumn, have a glass of wine and discuss what is (hopefully) a great book. So far so good. We chose to read The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which incidentally is one of my favourite books this year. Stunningly written and we all thought so. However, when we started discussing it, I was a little shocked to hear that two out of the five of us had listened to it rather than read it. Cheats! was my immediate reaction. But then I started to think about it. Maybe it was actually clever.
I’ve always loved audio books; in fact, I remember being insanely jealous of my best friend as a child because she had all four (then there were only four) Harry Potter books on tape. We used to listen for hours on end to Stephen Fry’s beautiful voice whilst playing. But is it really the same book? Do we get the same things from audio as paper? Or vice versa? Well for a start, I learnt from Stephen that Hermione is pronounced Her- my- oh- knee. Not Her-mi- ohny. I also realised I’d been doing Seamus Finnigan’s Irish accent wrong for 5 years. But surely that’s the best bit about audio books? The work is done for you. You don’t have to read the symbols and put together the missing pieces. You can multi-task – make a cup of tea, go for a run, walk to the park and finish a chapter at the same time. Pretty cool.
So where does that leave paper? Personally I don’t think either can replace the other. For practicality, yes, I guess audio books win. But what about the enjoyment of reading a book at the back of a cosy café and being invisible for a bit? It’s not quite the same, sitting in the same seat with your ear phones in, looking straight ahead. And what about book smell, and actually seeing the cover of a book (also reasons I prefer paper over eBooks). And isn’t it nice, that characters and locations, although exactly the same in audio books and paper, can create images individual to each reader? From a page, you’re told what a character looks and sounds like, but it’s your brain that fills in the blanks and I think some of that is a bit lost with an audio book. Everyone’s Seamus Finnigan has a perfect Irish, not Scottish, accent.
There’s space for both of them. Books shouldn’t be restricted to just paper, especially as audio ones are becoming ever more accessible and enjoyable. Personally, I reckon in the future I’d like to mix them a bit. Have the best of both worlds. Still be able to physically have the book and get the enjoyment out of reading, but also listened to a few chapters whilst doing something else. I’m not sure how that would work with characters’ voices and maybe it will just muddle the story for me, but definitely willing to give it a go.
Charlotte for the TripFiction team
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I’m a fairly recent convert to audio books and find them especially useful when doing the ironing! I agree they’re not a substitute for paper, but they provide a useful adjunct. The narrator makes a huge difference though. A good one like Stephen Fry really enhances a story but it can be a disaster. I’m afraid one book where the narrator tried to reproduce local accents was so clunky that I gave up.