some books are meant to be read with the ears

Last week my older son came down from Seattle to help me get started painting the garage, and while we were running errands the conversation turned to what we were reading. As it will do. He mentioned that he hadn’t been able to get into Jesamyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing when he was reading with his eyeballs. But reading with his ears, the elegance and poetry of her writing came alive. When I read it with my eyeballs I was absolutely captivated. But I wondered, what if I’d listened instead?

Sing Unburied Sing is one of the books I read around the time of my health crisis, and, surprisingly, I remember quite a bit of it—most of what I read and did during that chunk of time is utterly lost. A few of Ward’s other books were in a care package some friends sent, but by the time it arrived, I had already sunk deep into my obsession with A Gentleman in Moscow. Later, I associated those printed copies of Ward’s books with the dark time, so I never got around to reading them. Might give them a whirl with my ears.

Generally, audiobooks are my preference, because I can “read” while doing chores—important if you don’t share household chores with a chum. My favorite audiobook series is by Elly Griffiths, the Ruth Galloway books. When I listen to those stories, I sink into that world, and the characters are believable as real people we might know. But not all of the books are available in audio format, so last week when I read with my eyeballs one I’d missed, I was shocked and disappointed to find it so unsatisfying. The writing is so clean and concise, so efficient, that it’s over too quickly. I did not expect this at all.

It is probably unfair to compare Jessamyn Ward and Elly Griffiths, but it was curious to me that wildly different stories can be made or broken depending on how we experience them.

And speaking of broken—I also read, with my ears, Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt last week. But I cannot recommend the audio version, for two reasons. I believe that something must have been done post-production to eliminate all the natural pauses that readers would usually make between sections, making the narrator sound like a robot. Distracting.

The reader, as a reader, is skilled, but she mispronounces a staggering number of words, including, but not limited to: Kant, Thomas Mann, Papageno & Papagena, recitative, Messiaen, and presage. At first I just noticed, but then I started tracking them, because, Jiminy Christmas!

For the painting project last week, I moved on to Harry Potter, en Français. Let’s talk about that next time.

Which books have captivated you recently?