In defence of audiobooks

A certain stigma has attached itself to audiobooks. To the old school bibliophile, they are the literary equivalent of pre-chewed steak.

The sceptics may have a point. After all, reading is tiring for the same reason that chewing is – work is being done. The brain is just a lump of clever fat, of course, rather than bunched muscle, but it still uses up some 20 per cent of the calories we consume and so it shouldn’t really be surprising that we get tired reading.

Taking the sequenced squiggles on the page and converting them into the architecture of a story, a philosophy or a verse, is hard. Children find it hard, students find it very hard and the vast majority of adults find it gets harder and harder as time goes on. This is bad news for books. If adulthood meansgiving yourself permission to eat ice cream instead of spinach, who is going to choose books, when Netflix and GTA VI are on the menu? Yet, to echo Dorothy Parker’s famous remark about writing, as much as we might hate reading, we love having read.