Getting to Wonderland

Independent childhood reading seems to continue and elaborate upon the process of imaginative projection initiated through listening. It is, beautifully and openly, a voluntary participation in an ulterior scheme of reality. We might almost call it pure escape, except that getting away is probably less important than getting to… (Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies)

It’s beautifully stated. Is it true that listening is just the “initiating” phase? The preface to the Read-Aloud Handbook speaks of a student with astronomical test scores whose parents chalked it up to the fact that they continued to read aloud to him all the way through high school.

But if there’s some truth to the notion (as there probably is), my question is, have I slowed my daughters’ progress toward independent reading by letting them listen to audiobooks so much?

I’ve rhapsodized before about the virtues of audiobooks. But lately I’ve been working quietly to cover some of the ground formerly occupied by audiobooks with physical books. Audiobooks have some down-sides, too:

1. They make multi-task-reading possible. Some folks put on music in the background, but my daughters put on stories. They do their playing and building and drawing with Black Beauty or the Little House books or the Narnia books spinning out their worlds in the background. But they aren’t required to give these imaginative worlds their full concentration.
2. It’s possible to hear a story without getting lost in the clockless, inner world of a book — and without losing self-consciousness.
3. It’s possible to enjoy complex, deep tales without having to work — without having to sound out words, or figure out unfamiliar concepts from context, or be slowed to the pace of your particular capability at the moment.
4. It lacks the visual component of language on the page. How does the medium differ when heard instead of seen?

There have been rich cultures that depended on oral tradition. Maybe these things don’t matter. And just because it’s possible for them to happen doesn’t mean they are happening.

The one real concern is #3. Good readers acquire patience and diligence, because there’s no other way to get at the story — no other way to accomplish the “getting to” that Birkerts talks about in the excerpt above. That seems like a good thing to me, though I’m not entirely sure why. Is it because of this stubborn belief that good things should cost something? Or that some rites of passage are necessary? I don’t know. But a willingness to work at reading is something I want to encourage.