Yes, It's Just as Good as Reading: 9 Reasons to Start Ear-Reading Classic Books

Dear Reader, 

 I assume that if you have come to an audiobook blog called “Meet Me in Middlemarch,” you are the proverbial choir and I am about to preach at you. You either already listen to audiobook classics, or you want to. There may be somebody here for a nice rage read who doubts that audiobooks are valid, or thinks the classics are stupid, and they want to sit and chuff trollishly over their phone. This list is not for them. This list is for you, my high-achieving reader friend. It’s a balm for your internalized fear of doing things the “wrong way.”

1. Audiobooks are valid. 

Listening to literature is valid. It’s valid, and on this site we will avoid the cumbersome repetition “listening to audiobooks” by calling it reading. It goes without saying, but I’m just going to remind you that throughout history, people have told other people stories. Some forms of poetry were made entirely to be spoken aloud in front of others. In times when literacy was less widespread, great stories were still common, and spoken art is part of human culture. Now, I guess if we get nit-picky, the hand-held, mass-produced book was made for people to read on their own. But not exactly. If you love Regency and Victorian literature like I do, you've probably noticed people read to each other all the time in those texts. Off the top of my head, I can think of scenes where characters read to each other in George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte. 

Miss Fanny is reading aloud from a library book while the other sew or knit! 

2. They’re useful for multitasking. 

Multi-tasking with literature is not a new thing. Perhaps you aren’t going to listen to your love-interest/cousin read Coriolanus to you while you knit, but you can listen to Charlotte Bronte while you do the laundry, and kill two birds with one stone. (I’m not advocating bird murder, but as Dickens would say, the wisdom of the ancestors is in the simile. Or metaphor.) This is such an obvious benefit of audiobooks that I don’t want to spend much time here. Yes, at the gym, on the commute, while doing responsible grown-up things, and maybe also while playing a match-three game when you’re tired but want to do something with your hands. You can do this stuff with the TV on in the background, but well-written visual media tends to want to actually show you stuff. If you miss something in your audiobook, you can easily backtrack a few seconds, because … 

3. The Tech is Good. 

The tech is adjustable to your needs. We have so many good tech options for audiobooks right now. I know the apps aren’t perfect, but from an “our time in history” standpoint, it’s a phenomenal age for audiobooks. I use Audible. In my case, I have access to all of my books, sorted nerdily into collections. I like the sense of hoarding I get without a lot of memory scooped out of my phone for the books. There are also totally free options and library options, and Youtube has some audiobooks you can play through for free. Unlike the old cassette days, you can also easily adjust playback speed, skip around, and make quick bookmarks with light annotations. Audible allows for speeds from 0.50 to 3.50 times the original with remarkably little pitch distortion. I often run at 1.2 times the original, but if I am listening to a naturally speedy narrator or an author who loves to stack up clauses, I listen to it a little slower than the original. I love the sleep timer that you can set for the end of a chapter. Useful stuff. 

Disclaimer: Books purchased through links on my site could lead to benefits for me. But also, I talk about Audible because that’s what I know. I am happy to hear about the best aspects of your other favorite apps. 

4. Audio classics are cost-effective. 

If you find yourself paying for your audiobooks, then classics are cost-effective. They are long. I got started listening to classics on Audible with a complete set of Jane Austen, narrated by the lovely Alison Larkin, and it cost me one credit. That was six books and 84 hours of listening. And because Jane Austen and Alison Larkin are a really fun team, I can listen to it over and over. Audible also has the plus catalog, which allows subscribers to add books to their library for free. The plus catalog includes many classics that are very well-voiced. Also, if you have a book on Kindle, you can save on the Audible version. This has, on several occasions, reduced the cost of very long books for me. I know I got War and Peace for less than a dollar. Minutes to dollars, that’s wildly cheap. 

 

War and Peace was an epic bargain.

5. Classics offer more narrator choices. 

Because classics get recorded many times over, you can often find multiple versions of a book. A great narrator makes a huge difference to how much you understand or enjoy the book. You can hear regional variety in the characters, which I find really helpful as an American listening primarily to 19th century British novels. I can’t conjure up, say, a Yorkshire accent in my head, but a great narrator can fix that. If you’re making a choice on something long, check the samples and see who you like. A talented narrator brings new light to a text. Their acting skills may illuminate a moment in the text that might otherwise have been opaque or unremarkable to you.

6. Better narrators can lead to new understanding. 

Want to see an illuminating bit of acting? I like this snippet from Hamlet as played out by Andrew Scott and Jessica Brown Findlay:

Shakespeare is particularly meant to be acted, of course, but I would argue fiction is too. A solitary reader is in charge of the casting and of puppeting the actors in their own mind, and so they will have a lot of control, but where they lack light, their mental production will too. If you have ever read Hamlet to yourself, as maybe you did under duress for school, without time for fully informed deep reading, you may not have felt the sting of the “get thee to a nunnery” scene as much as you do watching Andrew Scott in the clip. Audiobooks offer us a luxurious freedom to move around and provide us with actors for our mental production, but they also demand a lot of us. The text is moving over us in time, and the emotions and impact are constantly washing over us. It’s harder to stop on a sentence we like and ignore one we didn’t want to think about. It’s easy to zone out, but unlike with a text, I don’t review a sentence over and over while my mind wanders. In audio, sometimes the text just moves on. And that is okay. I still get the benefit of the entirety of the work more than I would have if I had quit reading after I had been stuck moving my eyes across a sentence and then wandered off for two years. When I read visually, I tend to pour over small bits of a text and focus on tiny details (and then get distracted 😬).

 

I deeply believe that focused, annotative reading is valuable and sometimes transformative for both the reader and the text. I also believe in the value of letting a work flow over me and getting the whole of the story put together before I interrupt it. With the company of a narrator, it’s also harder to interpret a work in a completely solipsistic way. I have loved literature since I was a kid, but I don’t think I would have fallen in love with ponderous 19th century novels without hearing them. The works are a lot like those long walks the characters take together. They take their time and admire the scenery, and they go deep. 

7. You might get a verbal stat buff. 

I have noticed that listening to audiobooks boosts my fluency. Having Victorian classics on drip has kept me charged up verbally. Reading gives us fuel, puts us into the conversation of literature through history, and informs our style. Reading teaches us what we like and what we dislike in a book. If you aren’t interested in writing, developing verbal understanding and expression is still something of a superpower, and books--both paper and audio--develop those skills. I am not here to make empirical scientific claims, because I am not qualified to make them, but if you’re on my site to begin with, you are, as previously mentioned, the choir being preached at. Yeah yeah, we know. Reading is good. Reading promotes eloquent loquacity. (I apologize for that sentence. Reading is also good for vocabulary, some of which you won’t want to use much.) Audiobooks also serve this function, especially if they enable you to pay attention to books in a time when we are all so constantly distracted, a time when some of the most voracious readers I know keep complaining it’s been hard for them to finish a book. 

Bonus points for audio: you learn pronunciation. (Although I have heard readers mispronounce things. In one version of The Scarlet Letter, the narrator pronounced “analogy” as anal low gee. No.) 

Not finding "anal low gee" in the original text, what a shock.

8. Books from the past help us understand history. 

These days, I want to curl in a ball and cry about AI. What a terrible fate for people who want to do content writing that their jobs could be outsourced to machines. Have you ever heard of anything so terrible? Yes. You definitely have. Technology changes things. I take a lot of comfort from reading books where people grapple with the Industrial Revolution. Good literature is a cultural window to the past. The more you read, the more history connects in your mind. Sometimes I feel like every set of books I read have formed a sort of curriculum, because of the threads that tie their histories and themes together. I can’t think about the Industrial Revolution without mentally casting back to Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, in which a mill owner contends with anti-technology violence. While the mill owner benefits from the progress, many of the people around him are not in a position to benefit, and are being starved out. I think of the downtrodden workers in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, of riots, of steam engines, of Caleb Garth in Middlemarch calming the people who attacked the railroad workers: “Somebody told you the railroad was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway’s a good thing.”  Reading gives me a technicolor view of what history shows in black and white. It makes me feel connected to people from the past, and keeps me sane when I see current events. I mean . . . kind of sane, anyway. 

Reading gives me this grounding, and audiobooks give me reading. I don’t know if I would have gotten through my dear, dear Middlemarch if I had approached it in text only the first time. I know I wouldn’t have finished Shirley. I’m grateful that the technology has given me this kind of access, and also, it’s complicated. 

 

Are you there, Skynet?

9. You want to. 

The best reason to listen to big, chonky classics on audio? It’s something you want to do. I had about 20 more reasons (give or take some over-disambiguation), but I have to say this one is what matters, and so we’ll stop here. There are a lot of good things you can do with your time and your mind. If you want to enjoy classics this way, challenge yourself this way, relax this way, and use this tool, do it! Tackle the books you have always wanted to finish. Drift off with Dickens. Rediscover Austen. Meet me in Middlemarch.

Have fun.