The following passage considers the experience of listening to
recorded books. The passage is from a 1998 essay by a teacher of
writing and literature of who is legally blind.


For better or worse, listening to an audiobook almost always feels
like a shared experience. I feel myself not merely a passive audience
but engaged in a kind of exchange. Readers are not reading to me; we
a re reading together. I have a sense of continuous back-and-forth
commentary, where I bounce my ideas off the readers' ideas, or what I
perceive as their ideas from the intonations, mistakes, involuntary
grunts, and sighs. This is precisely what alarms the sighted reader
who thinks of reading as a private and intensely personal act, a solo
flight with no copilot to look over your shoulder, make snide
comments, or gush about the view. But I can't help myself. This way
of thinking about reading comes from the habit of listening to people
I know read aloud to me. When my husband reads to me, usually a big
novel or epic, the text becomes a topic of conversation throughout
the day. The initial impressions one has during the course of
reading, the ideas one revises or rejects as reading continues,
become our mutual property. We share the process of reading, a real-
time event in the intimate space where ideas take shape.


I require my writing students to turn in taped readings of their
work. This is not only a convenience that allows me to return their
work as quickly as a sighted teacher would. But reading their work
aloud also makes the students more conscious of flaws in their prose.
Frequently, I notice, they feel compelled to speak to me at the end
of the tape, particularly after reading a longer piece of work. "I
tried to do it another way first, but I think this works better,"
they say. "Reading it over, I see the ending is kind of abrupt." I
don't discount the possibility that these outpourings are staged
pleas for me to go easy on them. But I also think there is something
about having just read aloud for an extended time that makes them
drop their guard. I sense they are not so much speaking to me as
thinking aloud. I feel myself briefly invited into the mysterious
space between the writer and the text. I imagine them sitting alone,
in the circle of light cast by a solitary reading lamp. The text lies
in their laps. Or they read it off the computer screen, their reading
punctuated by an occasional tap-tap-tap of the scroll command.
Outside the circle of light, in the general darkness, I hover, a
receiving presence.