I sniffed at audiobooks for years but now I can multi-task, I’m all ears

Inever imagined I’d get into audiobooks. They always seemed to me to be a bit of a cheat, up there with electric bikes and ready made pancake mix. And since I’ve never in my life taken a short cut when I could go the uphill, long way round, easy, convenient audiobooks were never going to find their way into my ears. To paraphrase Mrs Doyle, some of us like the misery of reading books.

But there was something else going on as well and it’s taken me a bit of time to fully dissect this particular madness: deep, deep down, I feared that listening to books instead of reading them would actually affect my ability to read.

To make that sound marginally less insane, I should mention that I’m not a common or garden reader. I can’t remember learning to read and I was one of those deeply annoying children who land in junior infants already able to read the teacher’s manual upside down. I got a special dispensation from the council to use the adult section in Walkinstown Library when I was nine years old. I was never bookish in the sense that I wasn’t a quiet or studious child, but I did devour books at the rate of two or three a week. I don’t catalogue this in the showing off section; rather, I think it goes some way to explaining my antipathy towards audiobooks. Reader, I have always been really, really good at reading. And if you can run a marathon, why would you walk it?

Ironically, what changed all of that was Book Club, or Page Turners, as its first series was called. In case you missed it, Page Turners was — and still it, albeit under a new name that RTÉ thought less confusing than the frankly brilliant one that I came up with — a television series that features real life book clubs discussing real life books and a bit of real life and the universe as well. The first series ran last year and was recently, unexpectedly, repeated in the afternoons — leading to a modest amount of hilarity and downright terror when I kept suddenly hearing myself in my empty kitchen while I was loading the dishwasher (I do the voice over on the show.)

I was also a producer on it, which meant I had to read the 20 books reviewed before our book clubs got their mitts on them. And all the prodigious primary school reading and

Walkinstown Library shape-shifting in the world can’t help schedule 20 books into a couple of weeks already densely populated with other work and life and loading the dishwasher.

So I selected one of the non-fiction titles — having already decided I wouldn’t have the bandwidth to absorb fiction aurally while I was inevitably thinking about something else — and off I went. And I loved it. I loved the book, I loved the multi-skilling convenience of listening to it while I was doing something else, I loved how, for the first time in my life, I was able to combine two of my favourite activities: reading and exercising. So what if I lost my ability to read, I thought: hadn’t I read enough?

Besides, I was still reading. With a hefty reading list and a looming shooting schedule, I was essentially reading two books at the same time: one with my ears and another with my eyes. When I finished the non-fiction audiobooks, I tried the fiction — and although my predicted tendency to drift off did occasionally have me reaching for the rewind, I managed pretty well.

When we started into the second series, I learned — to my certain surprise — that a huge number of our book club readers had also digested their prescribed reading on audiobook. This was interesting because one, I don’t remember anyone mentioning audiobooks on the first outing and two, like me, these people love reading — hence the whole book club thing — and yet they didn’t seem to regard the advent of the audiobook as some sort of nuclear threat. One of them, a dyslexic reader, went so far as to call his audio experiences a game changer.

I thought I would put away my Audible when I finished the book club books. But there was one title that we ended up not featuring in the series and when I started reading it recreationally on my Kindle, I realised that it was a good story, poorly written. So into my ears it went — lest I’d have to pluck out my offended eyes — and when I picked up the Kindle again, it had skipped forward to where I was in the audio version. I didn’t know it could do this.

It has taken me longer still to accept that, after reading most of the books most of the time, it is unlikely that my new vice will render me illiterate. It won’t make me worse at reading.