The Strange Magic of Audio Books

I’m aware of audio books, having listened to them before. My first encounter occurred when I was much younger, listening to cassette tapes borrowed from the local library, as my mom, and her then boyfriend, drove my brother and I up to Mammoth one summer. (At least I think it was Mammoth, with a portion of the trip also going to Yosemite as well.) There were probably 20 cassettes to each plastic clamshell case, which also doubled as a tray to hold my Sony Walkman. Whatever the story was, it was fantasy related… I vaguely remember it was about wizards? Ultimately, as most big projects back then eventually escaped my attention span, I never finished it. For some reason wading in the icy rivers that flowed throughout the (incidentally) fantastic looking Yosemite valley was more appealing to an 8-ish year old.

Audio books now exist in a strange niche, given the prominence of podcasts, reels, TikToks, and whatever other forms of digital entertainment that have dominated our attention spans. Those of us that commute to work, or have enough time to go on walks or hikes, seem to gravitate toward them. And I’m surprised it took this long, frankly, for me to stumble along into such a delightfully antiquated mode of knowledge acquisition.

Given that an audio book is simply just a rendering of something originally written as text to audio narration, there are interesting patterns, phrases, and structures that emerge through this conversion process, perhaps illuminating how our brains process text and speech. (There’s probably a study somewhere out there that would elucidate the particulars, I’m sure.) Ingesting longform dumps of text has always been a struggle for me. Scanning a paragraph, then mulling over it for ten minutes, getting distracted by something outside, and mulling once more, until I understood what I had just read, then repeating this cycle over and over again until I eventually fell asleep on my bed. Reading for me has always been both intimate and intense, like staring into a lover’s eyes for an hour and then forgetting why you were doing it in the first place. I find the way a writer formulates an argument is, therefore, carried out in a very specific way. I was trained on the “hamburger paragraph” method in elementary school. (Topic sentence, three sentences of evidence, and a closing thought; rinse repeat.) But, then, as if knowledge itself congealed in nature like any other fractal pattern, the “hamburger paragraph” laid the foundation for the 5 paragraph essay format. (Introductory paragraph, three topic paragraphs that build your argument, and a closing paragraph to tie it all off.) God help you if you had to write something that deviated from the formula. (Like comedy, evidence comes in threes.)

Listening to a book is then like an out of body experience. You are experiencing a stream of consciousness that is suspiciously ordered. Podcasts are lucid in nature. Long form conversations that meander from topic to topic. An audio book feels more like a speech delivered with terrifying conviction. Only, somehow, instead of the argument being strengthened by short, concise statements, the oration’s 23 hour runtime becomes an all consuming rant, absorbed by the listener to great effect. It’s also fascinating to observe how the author structures their arguments. For example, I’m currently listening to Tom Holland’s Dominion, which establishes early Christian praxis as the foundational worldview that encouraged ideas like democracy and acts of charity to flourish in an otherwise barbaric age. Experiencing Holland’s argument through the medium of audio has helped my mind to wrap around his conclusions and to better recognize their building blocks. It feels like cheating, honestly. Although I’m only a couple chapters into the book, I can see why he would start with the Greeks and their gods, with all their inconsistencies and foibles. How this metaphysical instability shaped a culture of chaos. Painting a tumultuous time, filled with the ups and downs of Grecian geopolitical fortunes, to establish a fertile ground for the Romans, and their methods of conquest, which sought to give deference to the local gods of the lands they conquered. (The caveat, of course, that it was the true gods of Rome that were to be revered foremost going forward.)

It’s all, in the words of Lieutenant junior grade T’ Lyn from The Lower Deck, “fascinating…”

A slight update on Turing’s Miscellany:

It remains with my friend Greg of Electi Studio to layout and format for POD, but everything else is complete. My hope is that it will eventually get finished, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some lag time between now and that eventual end. He’s done so much for me, but people get understandably busy when they are running their own company! In fact, I would have been more surprised if it he had finished it by now, otherwise I would suspect my dear friend was now addicted to meth.

A slight update on what’s next:

I have started work on reviving my previous trilogy, preparing it for a conversion to long form prose. I can’t recall if I mentioned it previously, but my upcoming narrative project was once formatted to be a comic book. After writing Spirit of Orn, I wanted to create a weekly webcomic with a friend from college, but like most of my dreams it fell apart as we slowly grew apart. I had written 5 issues, scoped out a plot that would run 75 issues, and created an entire world with its own ecology and physical properties. I know where I want to take the books now, and 15 years later I feel mature enough to write them. This time I come prepared!

As always, happy reading.

SW