The Sound of Books
August 16, 2009

As much as I adore the acting of reading books I have at least as much affection for listening to them. This is something I have been doing this week while I have been cleaning the house, washing the car (several times due to falling ash from fires), playing referee between a new addition to and the old members of the family feline group, and eating breakfast on the porch.

I am particularly interested in books that are read by their authors. Having said that, I must also point out that books read by their authors who are not good readers are worse than not having them read at all. Once deeply disappointing experience that has kept me from getting past the first CD is The Bounty: The True Story of The Mutiny on the Bounty. The book was authored by Caroline Alexander, and I had the pleasure of meeting her after a speaking event at our local university. She had provided an extended history of the research that had gone into the book. And she was an excellent speaker. So when I saw the unabridged version of the book later I grabbed it even though I noted that Simon Prebble—a man!—was the reader. A man who, I am sorry, to say, has a voice like ice scrapping stainless steel at a speed roughly equivalent to a jet plane in the air. In other words, it was unpleasant. And unworthy. It angered me that someone likely thought a male voice would be more authoritative, more suited to a muscular story than a female one. Especially when that female one, assuming it was Ms. Alexander, would have done the book considerable justice.

I then turned to some other audio books that have been on my shelves. Bill Byrson’s In a Sunburned Country was one of my favorite reads, but in audio (this was my second time through) it became a wholly new experience. It was so different in fact that I came away with the sense that I had experienced two different books on the same subject.

The audio version is brilliant, made that way by Bryson himself who reads the unabridged version in a kind of “wow” sense that he himself is also just discovering the book and sharing it with a wide-eyed sense of wonder. (It also helps that he has a pleasing voice just made for audio, a slight British accent, and perfect enunciation. Those assets turned his amusing description, early on in the book, of a guided tour of Sydney from an earlier with a local sales rep from his publisher’s house, into something that had me laughing so loud I choked repeatedly. I have it here, but make no mistake: it should be listened to for maximum impact.

The only time I had seen anything at all of the real city was some  years before, on my first visit, when a kindly sales rep from my local publisher had taken me out for the day in his car with his wife and two little girls in back, and I had disgraced myself by falling asleep. . . .

I am not, I regret to day, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with some medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque, come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the  floor. Whatever is inside—tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air—decided to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling. And I snore, hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character, with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam-valve exhalations. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that bring to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown. Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within five hundred feet has stopped and all children under eight are clutching their mothers’ hems. It is a terrible burden to bear.

Even as I type the words I hear them more than read them. And there’s something undeniably special about that, that what I am hearing is exactly the way Bryson intended them, the same cadence, the same inflections, the exact intonations he intended.

That pleasure is exactly the same in Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa. It’s the author reading, and the author who is telling me how he told his story. What he emphasizes are his impressions of the most important things to him, and that includes something that in print but more so in audio left a deep and disturbing impression on me: Anak Krakatoa, Son of Krakatoa. The volcano that destroyed so much in 1883 has a descendant that is growing in size and strength. 

It was early on a warm summer’s evening in the 1970s, as I stood in a plam plantation high on a green hillside in western Java, that I saw for the first time, silhouetted against the faint blue hills of faraway Sumatra, the small gathering of islands that is all that remains of what was once a mountain called Krakatoa. . . . This, I remembered, thinking during the endless night of the flight back west, had been a scene of impeccable beauty. And all the more so because it presented a distant prospect of a place where the processes of the world were at work, a place of an elemental significance, and a disastrous place once—but these days quiet again, serenely biding its time.

To read about the awe that Winchester still ascribes to that first glimpse of Anak Krakatoa is powerful; to hear it in his own voice is to be afraid for what is coming. It’s things like this—hearing how the author feels about his words and about that volcano—that gives audio books their power.

But as noted, not all of them have that resonance. Nor does the ability to achieve that require the author. One audio book that I have listened to at least fifty times is an unabridged version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde read by, of all things, a British actor named Jonathan Hyde.

I keep it in my car to pull out any time I have a trip of at least one hour or if I am caught in traffic likely to last longer than five minutes. And when it opens to one of the finest voices to which I have ever had the pleasure of listening I find myself instantly transported back to nineteenth-century London. So accustomed am I to hearing the words that whenever I pick up the book I find myself actually reading the story in the exact cadence of the narrator’s voice, breathing when he does, reading the accented pronunciations as he does: “Mr. Utterson, the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty, and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.” As spoken in the audio version, the word “rugged” has a jagged edge to it; the word “cold” is spoken hastily as if the narrator wished to hurry out of the frozen expanses of the word; the phrase “long, lean, dreary” is prolonged, emphasizing the length of the words and the man; and the notable silence before “yet” gives notice that despite the more negative aspects of Mr. Utterson there is something redeemable in him.

For me, the spoken effect of the words has almost become larger than the written words. Undoubtedly it is because of the number of times I have listened to this particular recording, but I also wonder if I have allowed someone else, the narrator in this case, to overtake my own internal interpretation.

After all, I believe when we read we do so with our voices as well as our eyes. Not literally, perhaps, but mentally. We choose the emphasis and the cadence. We choose to pay more attention to some words than others. We put spaces where punctuation may dictate otherwise. But when we listen to audio books we allow someone else to provide that voice and those choices. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Certainly Bryson and Winchester have given me new feelings for familiar words. And I have a stronger attachment to Stevenson’s story due solely to the narrator who has imbued it with a decidedly British timbre providing a richness that I could not have given the story myself.   

I would never think of substituting an audio book for the book itself. In fact, I will not listen to an audio version of a book I have not yet read. When I enjoy both versions I feel as if I have indulged in a double-layer cake. It would be a perfectly satisfying cake with one layer, and I would not be shorted in any way. But when done well that second layer, rich with unique nuances, adds to the pleasure of the reading experience, intensifying and emphasizing the place of  book in my life.
 
Upcoming Book Festivals:
Unfortunately, there are none coming up this week. 

The Pub House:
Ash-Tree Press specializes in supernatural fiction in hardcover limited editions with print runs of generally five to 600 copies, bound in a luxury cloth, smyth sewn, and printed on rich paper. (Their trade paperbacks are also particularly well produced.) They are not inexpensive, neither are they prohibitive for the appreciator of finely made books. Beginning with 150 copies of Lady Stanhope's Manuscript and Other Supernatural Tales in 1994, Ash-Tree has since gone on to publish M. R. James, A. M. Burrage, H. R. Wakefield (in conjunction with Arkham House), and other classics of supernatural fiction as well as contemporary authors. Among their latest releases is Shades of Darkness, the fifth of their anthology collections of original supernatural fiction.

Of Interest:
The Smart Set is a online magazine, supported by Drexel University, that covers “culture and ideas, arts and science, global and national affairs—everything from literature to shopping, medicine to sports, philosophy to food. . . . [it] strives to present big ideas on the small, the not-so-small, and the everyday.”

What makes this publication so damn worthy of readers, including you and me, is its quality. Quite simply, the mix of top-notch reportage, personal and critical essays, travel writing, and photography makes this one of the best online publications I have seen to date. It is published, as its About Us page notes, “for people who enjoy reading, and enjoy thinking about what they read.”

Well worth reading as an introduction to it is ombudsman Owen Hatteras’s piece titled “On The Smart Set, journalism, sharks and mosquitoes,” which describes the original publication:

The Magazine of Cleverness . . . The Aristocrat Among Magazines . . . The Only Magazine with an European Air,” edited from 1914 to 1923 by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken. It was a fine magazine, publishing the early work of such talents as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Theodore Dreiser. Even though crotchety old Mencken in later years would call the magazine “the most dreadful piece of printing in New York.”

But that was Mencken. As everyone knows, he was always a real bastard. I’m still waiting for the $15 for my last contribution, a burlesque that really knocked their socks off. He told me the check was in the mail. This was 1922. Haven’t heard from him since. Is he still alive? If I ever see him again, I'll punch him in the nose.