My Reading Habits, Currently

I'm very fond of reading. Lately I've been getting back into it on three fronts: print (we moved a couch into the kitchen, since everyone hangs out there anyway, and there's a very cozy place to read); Amazon Kindle (whatever you say about the transition to e-books, reading in any form is better than not reading at all); audiobooks (just finished listening to Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them). No matter where I am or what I'm doing--audiobooks can be listened to from my laptop or iPod Touch--I have access and exposure to books.

It's a good life.

When I was in high school I used to read two or three books at a time. I don't know if my mind was especially active and needed that kind of switch-up, or maybe I had an inability to focus, but I found it gratifying and could follow each story. Sometimes it felt like each book was simply a different plot line in one much larger, byzantine text. The time I read Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad" and Memoirs of a Medieval Woman simultaneously was very satisfying, as they each documented their travels through the very same valley in the Middle East, separated by several centuries. How cool would it be to make a reading list of stories written all throughout the 19th and 20th centuries about one specific city?

I wonder what it would take for me to write my own book. I love writing short stories, but I've written a few and presented them to my writers group, and their reaction was that they wanted more. They liked the characters, they wanted to know more about their backgrounds, they wanted better explanations for behaviors whose rationalization I only hinted at. But could I expand these short stories into a book? I can't imagine I could justify that: one story was simply a character exercise in which a mother (aging, overweight, naive) quarrels with her son (pear-shaped, unkempt, arrogant) and that's all I wanted it to be, but my group felt very strongly that the story could have been doubled or tripled in length. I really don't have a grander message to share and I feel I'd need one to justify a book.

Audiobook Debate

Well, in the search for "other things to talk about" until our handmade holiday cards are done, I can muse about audiobooks.

There's a debate about these, has been for a couple years, and it's surprising to see who's on which side of the debate.  It flared up within the periphery of my consciousness when Rebecca got me an Amazon Kindle for a birthday/graduation present last April. I was all excited about it because I figured it was a luxury technology far beyond my reach, so I did some research about what it does, what it requires, what it's capable of, &c.

In this research I discovered one of its features is a voice synthesis program which can "read" aloud the digitized text on the screen. You can choose between a male or female voice, both speaking in an American dialect. The feature is for people who need their hands free, I guess, and can't hold the Kindle to click the Next Page button, or maybe for sightless individuals who can still download books and blogs in this way.

But there's an encampment of audiobook proponents who say that this feature unfairly cuts into their industry. Amazon is not paying for audio rights to these books, just programming the device with an ability to pronounce writing aloud. I think that's a valid concern for the industry, and I confess I didn't even know such rights existed. I know Roy Blount, Jr. is upset at this feature and has spoken against it.

I think he has nothing to worry about, however. If he'd downloaded his own book, Feet on the Street, and listened to it with the Kindle's voice synthesis program, he'd know that in no way is this a viable commercial competition. The program lacks inflection and cannot interpret the rhythm of a piece at all. Sometimes it breaks words into its separate syllables or mispronounces a word entirely. Once--and I've never been able to replicate it--my Kindle started reciting the programming code itself.

I bring up Feet on the Street in particular because I listened to the audiobook version of it. I'm told the abridged version was read by Blount but the unabridged was not, and that's the version we had, and it was read by someone who sounded like the spiritual and cultural opposite of Blount in almost every way. Try to imagine a down-home, backwoods travelogue of New Orleans performed by a young, genteel man fresh out of finishing school, striving to clearly enunciate every word. His soulless rendition of spoken quotes is quite comical. The Kindle would have done a bad job of it, too, but it would have been a different bad job.

As well, the National Federation of the Blind argues in defense of this Kindle feature, such as it is, because it provides access to literature that isn't yet available in Braille or in audiobook format. It kind of sucks to tell someone that, because they're blind, they're not entitled to the newest bestsellers on the market. And of course no one's explicitly saying that (who would dare?), but you can see how an argument against a handy speech synthesis program like this could be construed that way.

On the other hand comes Neil Gaiman's argument, that the audiobook industry needn't feel threatened by the Kindle's voice synthesis program--indeed, it should rally and play up its own strengths. It should explore not just its advantages of a colorful, flavorful voice actor performing a written work, but also what distinguishes audiobooks from print literature. I agree with him on all points: I've enjoyed wonderful audiobooks and developed favorite readers based on their interpretation of the text, a dimensionality not available from simply reading.

This isn't to say I don't like reading: I love it, I love the free reign over visuals I can attribute to my own impression of a book, but I've also come to enjoy listening to a talented recitation of a book.