I have to wonder, though, what the technology does to standards of writing. Nothing good, I suspect. There's a kind of alchemy that happens when you read with your eyes. A false sentence, be it description or dialogue, will grate on the brain. In audio an actor with bills to pay can take a stiff drink or two and wallpaper over the flaws.
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I'll allow it makes sense to listen to someone reading a book if one is driving a long distance or doing some other repetitive task - rather like listening to a radio. However, it wouldn't be my first choice of a way to absorb a book I was interested in reading and, considering most of the books I want to read never had a recorded version, it's not a choice I'll have to make. A big part of enjoying a book is in hearing the characters voices through one's eyes. Hopefully, I won't go blind..
Here's a tweet Jer came across this morning featuring Victor Davis Hanson: "We are in the middle of a cultural revolution." Neither of us tweets but we do sign in every day just to see what's happening at a few favorite sites.
There's something to be said for not having to make that choice. I think I'm like you in that I'm interested in books that are a little too old and/or obscure to have an audiobook version. The other problem with them, of course, is that they depend on you listening, which is more of an active process than many realize. You can have a big spoken out for you but not actually take it in. Of course you can look at a page and not absorb what's on it, but I suspect you'd be more aware of it if that were the case.
We have a lot of elites trying to prove their worth by outdoing each other in radicalism. That is analogous, at least, to Mao's cultural revolution. I wonder what the ultimate backlash will be.
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