Brick

The Web site of the town stacks, Fayet­teville Pub­lic Library, offers to e-mail patrons about new arrivals. A cou­ple of months ago I signed up for the non-musical record­ings noti­fi­ca­tion to help me grab new book-on-CD titles. The shelves increas­ingly are picked over every time I stop by, at least for vol­umes I’d want. Have I really read/heard all that inter­ests me?

No. The library is not buy­ing many. But it’s not nec­es­sar­ily a cost of our Good Depres­sion. The library is acquir­ing a num­ber recorded books, but they’re mostly in the juve­nile sec­tion. The FPL emails one to three notices a week, gen­er­ally each con­tain­ing five titles and syn­opses of a cou­ple dozen words. Until this week, roughly one in 10 is for the main stack and the other nine are “YA’s,” for Young Adult. (Ten adult titles were announced this week, finally.) How to tell? If you click on their links you see the online card entry stat­ing YA, yet that ini­tial list­ing often men­tions either teenagers or vampires.

Some­times teenage vampires.

Who am I to begrudge the edu­ca­tion of young peo­ple? It seems — though it may just be appear­ances — that fewer kids read any­thing out­side of class. Duffs like me can worry when the kids can’t be both­ered with what’s given us enlight­ened plea­sure, books. But does lis­ten­ing to CD record­ings or MP3 files con­sti­tute read­ing? This might be a case of “Audio books are OK for me, a grown-up, who has to com­mute and has less time than ever to sit with a paper-and-ink book. I bet though that both young­sters and their par­ents would say that the youth is busier these days as well. Nah: Those new­fan­gled i-Mod clocks of theirs have 13 hours in them.

What’s lost when a book is digested through the ears and not the eyes?

My com­mutes would be filled either with pub­lic radio news or music oth­er­wise. I stay fairly well informed so news­casts aren’t as vital. Tunes from FM or my own record­ings lull me when I need all my senses for Inter­state 540. Thus, nar­ra­tions. I veer in two direc­tions, page-turners and books I’ve long meant to read (both clas­sic and cur­rent). Right now I am two-thirds through the 18 discs of Moby Dick, which works great with a nar­ra­tor. If you’ve had trou­ble with William Faulkner on the page, you might find lis­ten­ing to his nov­els not only engross­ing but funny. Her­man Melville? His first-person nar­ra­tor is a second-rate sailor yet first-class wiseacre. Who knew?

Maybe audio books don’t stunt the lit­er­ary devel­op­ment of the young. As long as they absorb great books, whose busi­ness is the for­mat? Surely it’s bet­ter to lis­ten to unabridged clas­sics than either to rely on Cliffs Notes or movie adap­ta­tions, which by neces­sity leave so much out. I’m not such a duf­fer to rule out elec­tronic books; I can’t see much dif­fer­ence between read­ing a book on Kin­dle or an iPhone and my big brother’s old paper­back of The Great Gatsby that he read for class. The lat­ter of course has the odor of authen­tic­ity. Warm plas­tic and sol­der has noth­ing on yel­low­ing pages, dust and a trace of mildew.

My Beloved tries the occa­sional audio book but they’re not the neces­sity for dri­ving that they’ve become for me. She’s com­pleted a very few non­fic­tion titles on her com­mutes. For our road trips, I’ve checked out three or four at a time, hop­ing one sus­tains her inter­est. At best, we get most of the way through one set, aban­don­ing the oth­ers after 10 to 30 min­utes. She won’t like them, get bored, or we get to talk­ing and for­get to hit play again and fin­ish the set. On the last trip, in March, the win­ner was The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzger­ald. She’s never read it; it’s one of the few nov­els I enjoy reread­ing. It is a small novel and recorded fills just four 70-minute discs. But as usual between meals and c-store breaks — and con­ver­sa­tion — we did not fin­ish the the last disc.

MB asked me how it ended. Our mutual lis­ten­ing stopped just after the cli­mac­tic car acci­dent. I began to tell her, but the phone rang or some­thing and she hasn’t asked me to fin­ish telling her. That turned out to be a relief.

To tell her Jay Gatsby this, Nick Car­raway that and Daisy Buchanan the other ruins the book in any for­mat. Gatsby is big­ger than its plot and char­ac­ters. Who can sum­ma­rize Fitzgerald’s prose poetry and how that fleshes out the themes of youth and alien­ation, and how class func­tions in class­less Amer­ica, bet­ter than Scott himself?

You risk los­ing your audi­ence if you insist on explain­ing the green light on the dock. You can’t answer the “Then what hap­pened?” by recit­ing the best sen­tences, rang­ing from, “They were care­less peo­ple, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and crea­tures and then retreated back into their money or their vast care­less­ness or what­ever it was that kept them together, and let other peo­ple clean up the mess they had made,” to, “So we beat on, boats against the cur­rent, borne back cease­lessly into the past.”

I’ve lis­tened to audio books for about 10 years of 20-minute one-way work com­mutes. The for­mat took months to get used to. Even now the wrong or incom­pe­tent nar­ra­tor — authors rarely can pull it off them­selves — kills it.

Yet now that I’m hooked on audio books, I know I get nearly every­thing I’d get out of print ver­sions. Per­haps MB has not passed that learn­ing curve. And teenagers, whom the library is favor­ing with set after set? Must be evolution.