Audiobooks, Books & Literacy

My thoughts have dried up somewhat over the past few days--perhaps in contrast to the wet weather. I have started a few thoughts, but did not finish. This at least may prevent me from being too hard on my composition students this semester, who will be writing blogs as part of their daily/homework grades. To fill in the gaps, a few collections of words. . .

Today, to test out our new DSL connection (yay! no more dialup!), my husband was looking through the iTunes Latino audiobooks store. I found several of the top 10 downloads rather inspiring:

2) Don Quijote
4) Pablo Neruda reading his own work
5) The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
6) The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
8) The Illiad
9) 1001 Arabian Nights

The English language top 10 in the U.S. iTunes store are not so inspiring:

1) Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner
2) How to Make People Like You by Nicholas Boothman
3) The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama
4) The Audacity of Hope by Barak Obama
5) Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich
6) The Funny Thing is by Ellen Degeneres
7) The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
8) Rich Dad, Poor Dad:What the Rich Teach their Kids about Money - That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
9) How to Not Suck at Sales
10) This American Life: A Very Special David Sedaris Christmas

I suppose both lists may have one element in common: they may demonstrate that those who are downloading them have some kind of impulse toward self-improvement, though I would venture that the term would be defined differently in each case. However, in the case of one of the lists, pure aesthetic enjoyment could as easily be a motive for listening. How few on the second list are fiction! I am struck in particular by number 8. I would like to see the book titled, What Those Who Have Had to Live Without Money Can Teach Those Who Have Had Too Much of It. When it is published, I hope to be notified.

It strikes me that audiobook downloads are a marker of something that is not quite literacy, but is related. Listening to an audiobook requires a different level of time commitment than reading. It may be accomplished during a commute, a road-trip, a cross-country drive. . . My family has developed a ritual for road-trips. Listening to Tolkien. With weeks in between, we listen more or less sequentially to all of the books of The Lord of the Rings, which my husband and I have read multiple times each. At times, I may select a "moment" of Middle Earth and start from there.

Having read the book, I am able to listen to the book; I can not listen to a book I have not read. My first experience of audiobooks was disorienting, at best. Traveling to a conference with a friend and her husband, I listened with them to mysteries--something set in the South and involving lawyers, Grisham perhaps. I admit that this is not my taste in books, but I was literally spatially disoriented. I could not imagine being able to locate a sentence--even a scene!--in a book that was only heard and not read. I believe that the experience is one of "secondary orality," as I understand Walter Ong's term--scripted orality, speech that can be replayed. I confess to be utterly dependent on language made visible.

My other thoughts are also book-related--one disturbing, one pleasing. The first is a Christian teen book titled something like One God, Many Churches. In the future, I will try to avoid titles which, in 'hip' language, try to explain denominational differences. For me, for now, the offending phrase is the equation of "Sacraments" with "rituals."

I have been reading a book I discovered while looking for reading material for my 4th grade son. It is perhaps a bit dark for him, but I am enjoying it--The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, an odd science fiction that reminds me, vaguely, of the "feel" of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The city in the book--a city in darkness whose lights are failing--reminds me of one Calvino may have written. It feels real, somehow surreal. I look forward to reading more, which is unusual of late! (at any rate, for fiction)