Reading out loud triggers something very human, very ancient, and very rewarding via IrishTimesBiz
Heaney was extraordinary. I’d given my classes a few of his best-known poems for advance reading, but worried whether his bogs, potatoes, ploughs ands water pumps would have anything to say to my suburban and immigrant students.
I needn’t have worried. He was electric, and they were wired right into it. Poetry worked just as it should – words carried not just their surface meaning but layer upon boggy layer and reached down to grasp something shared, something true, that spanned cultures. And, importantly, there was that Heaney person and voice, filling an overflow campus auditorium, like a rock star. He’d recently won the Nobel Prize, helping to make the reading an occasion.
I’d like to think those students internalised that evening, that they want on to read to their own children because they suddenly remembered, as they hadn’t since they were small, want it means to listen, to hear, to sit in silence, to think, to let the articulated word sink slowly into the depths of consciousness, to be restored to the self, the internal person, in some special way that must awaken something primordial, that we’ve done as a species since we huddled in caves and hunted mammoths.
My San Jose students then were at the leading edge of the digital generations to come. Many grew up with the first home computers, and played early digital games. Are they audiobook-buying millennials now? Do they recall how reading could give one pleasure, but listening, deliver something fresh and valuable in its own right?
That’s how I view audiobooks. And so must many others, in a market that is growing at a over 25 per cent per year, boosted, apparently, by us being literally left to our devices during Covid. What that might mean, is a topic for another day. But for now, I’m emphatic that yes: you can, joyfully, be both Team Print and Team Digital Audio.
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