The following passage considers the experience of listening to
recorded books. The passage is from a 1994 collection of essays on
reading in the electronic age.

When we read with our eyes, we hear the wods in the theater of our
auditory inwardness. The voice we conjure up is our own -- it is the
sound-print of the self. Bringing this voice to life via the book is
one of the subtler aspects of the reading magic, but hearing a book in
the voice of another amounts to a silencing of that self -- it is an
act of vocal tyranny. The listener is powerless against the taped
voice, not at all in the position of my five-year-old daughter, who
admonishes me continually, "Don't read it like that, dad." With the
audio book, everything -- pace, timbre, inflection -- is determined
for the captive listener. The collaborative component is gone; one
simply receives.

Both the reader's inner voice and the writer's literary or stylistic
voice are, obviously, sexed. When I read a male writer, I siply adjust
my vocalization to the tone of the text; when I read a woman, I don't
attempt to impersonation, but I am aware that my voicing is a form of
translation. But when I listened to a cassette of John Cheever's
stories read by an expressive female voice, I just couldn't take it.
Midway through "The Enormous Radio" I had to pop the tape from the
machine to keep her from wreaking havoc on my sense of Cheever.
Cheever's prose is a imprinted with his gender as Virginia Woolf's is
with hers. Nor could I get past the bright vigor of the performing
voice; I missed the dark notes, the sense of pooling shadows that has
always accompanied my readings of the man.

Sometimes, to be sure, the fit is excellent -- either because the
reader achieves the right neutrality, allowing the voice to become a
clear medium for the text, or because the interpretation somehow
accords with my own expectations. Then, too, I have had the pleasure
of hearing an author rendering his or her own work. Indeed, listening
to certain re-mastered recordings of the "greats," I have experienced
the skin-prickling illusion of proximity (I am actually listening to
James Joyce...). The author can open up a work in ways that no other
reader can. At moments like these, I find myself wavering, questioning
the fixity of my assumptions.