My brief love affair with audiobooks has come to an end. It wasn’t a sudden thing; it was more like a gentle and mutual realisation that we were not compatible. I don’t know what I expected from this relationship but, whatever it was, it was not what I got.
Like many relationships, it began with optimism: this is good, this will fulfil me, why didn’t I know about this sooner? But the ending is slower, a petering-out until there is nothing left but the sweet memories of what might have been.
If I am honest, my lasting memory is of frustration: the frustration of listening to the beginning of innumerable books until I found a reader who satisfied me, then the slow awakening to the fact that listening to a book is not at all like reading it. Perhaps I felt like a voyeur, intruding on someone else’s pleasure. Reading is an intensely personal experience and I didn’t feel comfortable listening-in. Maybe I felt like a guilty lover, who had committed himself to one love for his whole life and now finds himself tempted by a bright, new pretty face. But the new love is strangely unsatisfying.
Enjoying my old love, reading words on a page, is like wearing a pair of comfortable slippers. This is how it’s been for almost 75 years and it just feels right.
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