David Lipsky, another New York writer and frequent dog-walker, said he often "shuffles" music on his iPod, and has similarly come to enjoy jumping between chapters of, say, James Joyce, Martin Amis and Al Franken as he circles the block.
Charlton Heston reading The Snows of Kilimanjaro proved a dud, even if it was sandwiched between Jeremy Irons reading Lolita and Robert Frost reading his own poems.
"You keep waiting for him to announce that Kilimanjaro's been taken over by damned dirty talking apes," Lipsky said. "Now it's hard to read Kilimanjaro without hearing Heston's voice."
The novelist Sue Miller said she prefers Henry James on tape because the narrator has untangled the complex sentences for her. But she found DH Lawrence unbearable. The author's notoriously repetitive prose "doesn't lend itself to an auditory experience," she said.
Some critics are dismayed at the migration to audio books. The virtue of reading, they say, lies in the communion between writer and reader, the ability to pause, to reread a sentence, and yes, read it out loud -- to yourself. Listeners are opting for convenience, they say, at the expense of engaging the mind and imagination as only real reading can.
"Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear," said Harold Bloom, a literary critic. "You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you."
The comedian Jon Stewart opens the audio version of the mock history textbook he co-authored, America (The Book), by lampooning the format. "Welcome, nonreader," he intones. Listeners are advised that the listening experience "should not be considered a replacement for watching television."
Audio book aficionados face disdain from some book lovers, who tend to rhapsodize about the smell and feel of a book in their hands and the pleasure of being immersed in a story without having to worry about the car in the next lane.
Gloria Reiss, 51, of St Louis, said her officemates correct her when she mentions having read a book.
"They'll say `you didn't read it, you just listened to it,'" said Reiss, who switched to audio when her two jobs and three poodles made it hard to find time to curl up on the couch. Recently, a colleague refused her urging to take a Stephanie Plum mystery along on a long drive.
"She goes, `I like to read my books,'" Reiss said, "like that makes her better than me."
Reiss' husband, Ken, says he remembers more of books that he hears, perhaps because he's simply wired that way. Levi Wallach, 36, of Vienna, Virginia, says he's a slow reader, "so it's much more efficient for me to listen while I do other things."
Most audio-book lovers argue that one is not better than the other. Some say it was not until they started listening to books that they realized how much of the language they were skimming over in the books they read on paper. And then there is the sheer pleasure of being read to.
RSS