AUDIO

Since listening to The Marriage Plot, I’ve been trying to figure out how an audio book could wield such a possessive force that I felt inclined to stop everything (showering included; gross) to listen. It takes a good plot to do this (duh). But it also occurs to me how much I enjoyed the inherent nature of the medium (audio!) with which I processed the story. I had a complete lack of internal debate while listening to The Marriage Plot. When I read dialog, sometimes I get hung up on a short phrase. I question the inflection with which that part should be read. Is this curt? Is this subtle? Sometimes I read a piece of dialog out loud, trying out different voices, three or four times before moving on. (Yes, I'm that person muttering aloud to themselves on the city bus.) But this time, by listening, I didn’t have to make any of those decisions because the reader made all those interpretations (and, thankfully, I liked his taste). It was perfectly effortless.