The Alliteration, Can You Hear It?

 Audiobooks are rapidly becoming my format of choice for consuming new written word.  This is somewhat ironic, given that the first book I can remember being obsessed with was read (with sound effects!) on a cassette tape.  I listened to the adventures of young Will and Planetron until the tape was ruined and the companion book of illustrations fell apart.  Still, that was a long, long time ago and it wasn't until a few years ago, while moving cross country, that I gave audiobooks another shot.  The upsides--they go everywhere I go, they can be listened to while accomplishing mundane tasks, and they're generally cheaper--seem to just barely outweigh the downsides--you can't easily lend it to others so it can sit on their coffee table unread, no satisfying page turning, no one on the subway gets to know you're enlarging your brain with Stephen Hawking and not listening to the new Black Eyed Peas album.  Well, maybe the downsides and the upsides aren't even on a fair playing field, but as someone who is a voracious consumer of content of all kinds, I need to take it in in the most efficient manner possible.  But the audio book presents a linguistic conundrum.  For literally centuries, humans have conjugated some form of "read" to indicate the titles they have consumed.  When I tell someone that I am listening to a great book, I get a look roughly akin to the look I imagine I would give if you told me that you had driven your lawnmower down the New Jersey Turnpike.  You're doing it wrong.  

        But I DID listen to the book.  I can't very well say that I've read it, though I certainly have in the colloquial sense of the term.  As time and generational concepts of content consumption progress, I'm sure that our culture will conjure up an acceptable term or phrase for the act of reading a book by way of having it read to you.  Perhaps "listen" will win out, or perhaps there is some other phrase lurking on the horizon.  I can only hope that future generations will say, "Hey, Dude, I'm audibryching this great book on hoverboards!"*  Even there, though, is the anachronism of the word book.  If actual, printed books go the way of the newspaper and the magazine--and that might not be a bad thing--will we still call it a book?  

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I'm going to endeavor to occasionally use this space to talk about the good and not-so-good books I read/listen/consume and that it's really the stupid stuff that no one should ever worry about that keeps me up at night.  

*Yes, Dude is forever

Also, if you know any kids aged 5-9, they've recently remastered the original recording of Adventures in the Solar System: Planetron & Me and it's available on iTunes for only $1.95.  Absolutely worth it.  I bought it just for the memories.