A few years back I started putting
Teacher/Author on any sort of form
that asked for my profession. I started saying it too. “Profession? Teacher
slash author.” In time I started stressing the and. Sort of like: “Surprise, there’s more to me.” I started doing
this because as I started seeing more of my pieces get published, including a
book, I wanted to embrace the fact that I had a second job. Perhaps someday
I’ll write Author/Teacher but that
feels a bit like crossing a line. It may be pompous to use a two-career title,
but besides the publications I decided that anything that pays regularly needs
credit as a career. Teacher stays first because it’s my career and my chief
obsession, the place where I currently do the most good for society (and that
matters). Teaching pays the bills, writing pays my ego. One a passion, one an
obsession.
The thing about being a Jack of
Two Trades is I’m not pretending at night I’m something I’m not by day. I am an
English teacher and an author in the English language, I’ll point out the
obvious and say that both of my jobs involve the understanding of, mastery of,
and refined usage of English. All of my working hours are spent involved in the
craft of our communication. Books, stories, poems, plays, articles, blogs,
rants, raves—I read, write, and teach all of these. Every single day. It’s a
pretty cool dual-vocation, challenging and exhilarating, and best of all what I
do in one informs upon the other. Oh sure, somedays I wish I was a Teacher/Plumber because both of my jobs
suffer the judgment of not being “real work” in the eyes of those who judge how
hard some work than others—which is everyone—but I’m being oversensitive and
digressive.
A hat I wear inside the hat of
being an English teacher is a teacher of English Language Learners, students
and immigrants and international students who are the cluster-bomb of a
language to their linguistic arsenal. During a novel study with an ESL group I
played my students the first chapter on audiobook, as a change from me reading
it to start and to sort of whet their appetite for the novel. (Yes, English Teachers/Authors believe Students/Readers can have literary
appetites whetted.) My ELLs loved this, finding it much more approachable, and
asking if they could have the whole novel read to them this way, or failing
that, for me to do it. I told them it wasn’t going to be possible as this was
an accommodation, and not actual reading, in the strictest sense. In my heart
it felt a bit like cheating.
So what is our opinion on the
audiobook, oh rhetorically-addressed readers? In recent years I’ve started to
listen to them more often because life’s just too damn busy (especially when
your career has a slash in the middle) for a guy to keep four or five books on
the go anymore. But when you listen to them, are you actually reading them. It’s a literal and
philosophical quandary—the sort that appeal a lot to us English two-job types.
So let’s ponder it further, shall we?
In my journal, I’ve been keeping a
list of books for well over a decade. Rather creatively, I call it my Booklist. I think it started when I saw
one of those lists of the best books of all time and it got me thinking about
how many of them I had read, and how many remained to be read. See, with an English degree, a teaching degree
specializing in English, and an already-healthy appetite for reading, a lot of
those subjective “great” books had already passed my vision. So I created a
list of the remaining dozen or so. The list got added to, but I’ve been working
it down over the years.
In early 2016, I realized that I
had fewer than ten left. One was War and
Peace, another was Moby Dick. Big
books, difficult books, dated books. In some cases books you’re more likely to want
to say you’ve read than to have read, though there are always surprises. When
your reading time is as limited as I’ve already shown you mine is, tackling
these big suckers—many of them more work to read than is worth what you gain
from them—facing the challenge doesn’t always seem worth the while. So over the
year I’ve worked through audio versions of some of them. Let me tell you, that
was the only way to read Moby Dick, take my word for it.
Those bragging rights got me
thinking once again, though. Could I say that I had actually read the books. Is listening to a book
be read the same as reading? In many ways I was more attentive than I would’ve
been with a dull book like Melville’s by having it read to me than reading it
myself and having mind wander off as the dead prose lulled me, more than
reading it on my own. But you could argue that just sitting (or running,
driving, cycling, working in the garage) and listening to a book isn’t reading
because it isn’t as dedicated to the book. But isn’t the bragging attached to
the accomplishment of having actually read it.
Back to my classes now. I mark
provincial exams and to have a reader or CD is considered a pretty major
accommodation because of how sacred the actual act of reading is. The main
thrust of the exam is still that you gave read it, not that you have had it
read to you.
Just what exactly do we mean by
“reading?” The simplest definition that strikes me is that reading is the
uncovering of meaning by decoding phonetic symbols that have been formed into
words, which through their
combinations create a text. The audiobook removes that decoding by at least
removing the difficulty of interpreting the words. This is no small thing. I
consider myself a fairly verbose guy but I have more than once been surprised
by an audio reader/performer’s delivery of a new word, or a word I had always
pronounced wrong and never had the notice to correct despite nearly four
decades as a reader.
There’s some credibility, then, to
saying that listening to an audiobook is not reading because it skips a step.
The reader herself is not doing the part where she must encounter text,
interact with it, decode it, (enjoy it, hopefully), and master it.
And speaking of interaction, how
you do it is now dictated by a surrogate. I gave up on e-readers after my first
go not on some sort of honour for the smell and the feel of books (although
that matters to me) but because I can’t interact with a text as I like to that
way. I flip around, go back over passages, I write down quotes, I underline
passages. A name looks different to me than when I hear it; I stare for a long
time at proper nouns. I try to guess the etymology of some words. All of this I
have to suspend while listening to (note I didn’t say reading) an audiobook.
Maybe it sounds like I’m moving
towards decrying audiobooks. I’m not. What I am doing is trying to decide if listening can count as reading in
the face of all of this evidence that says it cannot. I’m not sure an answer is
coming. Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading a book? No. But how
different is it? Enough.
Does that mean I’ll stop listening
to audiobooks? No. Beyond that make what you will.
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