not so easy to fool

Graphic Novels and A Curse Dark as Gold

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:02:27 GMT

I've been devouring graphic novels recently, because I don't feel nearly as guilty when I read them (instead of books I'm supposed to be reviewing) as I do when I read anything else.

So here's a quick run-down:
--Babymouse #8: Puppy Love!, by Jennifer and Matthew Holm -- fun as always.
--Bone Vols. 1-5, by Jeff Smith, and Rose, by Jeff Smith & Charles Vess -- NEED MORE NOW!!!
--Amulet, Book One: The Stonekeeper and Flight: Volume One, by Kazu Kibuishi -- the man's marvelous.
--Angel: Strange Bedfellows and Other Stories, by Christopher Golden -- old-school Angel comics, but still pretty good considering.
--Spike: Asylum, by Brian Lynch and Franco Urru -- notable because I've been reading the new "Season 6" Angel comics, After the Fall, which are also written and drawn by Lynch and Urru. Spike: Asylum isn't canon, but it was good enough to impress Joss and get them the Angel Season 6 comic book gig. Obviously, I've also been keeping up with the new Serenity and Buffy comics. Because it makes me happy.

Also, a couple of picture books:
--A Kitten Tale, by Eric Rohmann -- it was cute.
--The Arrival, Shaun Tan -- an immigrant's story in a fantastical metaphorical world, told entirely in pictures. Impressive.

But the real reason I wanted to post was that I have finished one novel lately, because it was due back at the library and couldn't be renewed (which was how I justified reading it instead of review books):
--A Curse Dark as Gold, by Elizabeth C. Bunce. This was a beautifully realized Rumpelstiltskin retelling, set in a society on the cusp of something resembling England's Industrial Revolution. Bunce's writing was engaging, her characters compelling, her romance endearing, and her magic stirring, frightening, and lovely all at once. She draws you into the day-to-day life of running the mill, and suddenly you find yourself utterly caught up in the characters' misfortunes as event spin themselves towards darker and darker disasters. A triumph.

RETURN OF THE GREAT BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 02:08:12 GMT

It's that time again -- I'm giving books away! And this time, I've made it super easy by putting them in my LibraryThing catalog. Assuming I've done it right, the widget below will show 10 random books from the 50+ I'm giving away, and if you click on the image, it will take you to my librarything and display a search of my catalog for the tag "giveaway." You can see covers, bibliographic information, anything you could possibly want to know. (In the catalog, clicking on the covers gives you an option to look up the book on Amazon.com.) Want anything? Just let me know -- comments, e-mail, whatever works!!!

EDIT: Claimed books have had their tag changed from "giveaway" to "claimed," so they no longer appear on the list. If you want to see what they are, you can search my catalog for the tag "claimed"... Also, if I've borrowed anything from you, it might be worth searching my catalog for the word "borrowed." It ought to be there!

Books So Far in 2008 (w/ my brief impressions)

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:46:27 GMT

Book of A Thousand Days, by Shannon Hale. I thought this was even better than Princess Academy -- in fact I think it's my favorite of all her books so far. A really, really well-done retelling of a little-known Grimms tale (Maid Maleen), set on the Mongolian steppes -- and it certainly seems well-researched, very believable and engaging. LOVED it.
--Keturah and Lord Death, by Martine Leavitt. I very much enjoyed the way it was told. There was something a little self-conscious about the first few chapters that meant I was not surprised to hear she began the project in a writing class (I remember thinking that about An Na's A Step From Heaven, as well) but soon enough I got into it and stopped noticing. All in all, a very pretty story.
--The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. Still cannot believe this was so totally snubbed by the ALA. Well, maybe I can believe it -- the material is pretty edgy. It's a truly excellent book.
--Wildwood Dancing, by Juliet Marillier. It's The Twelve Dancing Princesses meets The Frog Prince, in Transylvania. This is me we're talking about. How could I not love this? I loved this.

Picture Books:
--Cowboy & Octopus, by John Scieszka and Lane Smith. Aww, a friendship book for the post-George and Martha generation. I lurved it.
--Knuffle Bunny Too, by Mo Willems. Very cute, but the review I read of it described it in too much detail and kind of took all the fun away.
--Bearskinner, by Laura Amy Schlitz and Max Grafe. Loved it! Let's hear it for little-known Grimms tale retellings.
--Little Red Riding Hood, by Andrea Wisnewski. Passable.
--Little Red Riding Hood, by Jerry Pinkney. I like the art, but the retelling was meh.
--365 Penguins, by Jean-Luc Fromental and Joëlle Jolivet. This was hilarious. Mostly I just loved all the illustrations of the OMG PENGUINS, though the math problems were fun too. The environmental message didn't seem too heavy-handed to me.
--How Big Is It? A BIG Book All About Bigness, by Ben Hillman. The book superimposes images of large things (a train running down the side of the Great Pyramid of Giza; a polar bear on its hind legs towering over a professional basketball player in midair slam-dunking the ball) to give a sense of scale. The tongue-in-cheek descriptions that accompany the pictures are fun too. Very cool!

Read for the Horn Book Guide (you can look up the reviews if you like; they're not anonymous):
--Snowbone, by Cat Weatherill
--The Tapestry Book 1: Hound of Rowan, by Henry H. Neff
--An Unexpected Apprentice, by Jody Lynn Nye
--The Mortal Instruments: City of Ashes, by Cassandra Clare

Special Consideration:
--The Rope Trick, by Lloyd Alexander
--The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio, by Lloyd Alexander
Lloyd Alexander died in 2007, at the age of 83, and these are his last books. (Technically, The Xanadu Adventure and Dream-of-Jade came in between, but I still see them as part of the same final artistic movement.) He said, before he died, that with Carlo Chuchio, he felt he had completed his life's work. Such a wonderful thing for a creator to be able to say. As far as I could tell, both of these took place in a newly created world (the same world, though they took place in different countries) -- not full of magic and idealism and deep mythological roots like Prydain, but not so grim as Westmark, either. Melancholy, rather. Possibly like Sebastian's world, perhaps (and I'll have to go back to check what kind of "world" Marvelous Misadventures took place in -- I also wonder, how many worlds did Alexander create, in all? Anyway). Both of these books were excellent. I was half in tears for most of Chuchio, though only some of that was the emotional resonance of the story itself; some of it was simply the awareness that I was reading my very favorite author's very last book, and not very so long after his death, either. It wasn't his greatest work (I think that's still probably The High King, despite the many amazing books he wrote after that one), but it was very beautiful, utterly Alexanderian, and, I think after some reflection, yes, a fitting end to his writing career.

He's in the Summer Country now -- or perhaps he's become a part of Carlo's beautiful golden dream. Thank you, Lloyd.

So Many Books, So Little Time

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:00:38 GMT

How many books would you estimate you've read in your lifetime?

I know this is difficult or impossible to do. But... I'm going to give it a shot. I've been keeping track since 2005, and the numbers have been dramatically different in different years (which has a lot to do with grad school, I imagine). Let's say I started reading books at age six; I'm 28 and a half. Between the ages of eight and eighteen I read A LOT more than I did at any other time besides grad school -- but I also did a lot of rereading. I read much longer books when I was in high school and college than I did when I was younger or when I was in grad school (I wouldn't be surprised to find I read something like 150 picturebooks when I took a class in Picturebook, which all by itself is enough to skew a lifetime average if counted the same way as other books). Not counting picturebooks I was generally required to read about 2-6 books a week, of varying lengths. Sometimes more; on the other hand, when I had time off, I read less than I would have had I not been exhausted of reading.

According to my records:

So far I've read 8 books in 2008 (children's and YA books, but none particularly short). I may or may not finish #9 before Friday (probably yes). At this rate, my average for the year 2008 will be around a hundred; I may or may not keep that rate up. Probably not.

I read ~75 books in 2007.

I read ~115 books in 2006 (half of this is a grad school year; it's also the year I listened to audiobooks almost every waking moment).

I read ~125 books in 2005 (another grad school year, and this includes the Picturebook class -- I clearly wasn't counting them as "whole" books, or I'd have easily passed two hundred, but I know they still figured into that average somehow).

Okay, so, based on this and the abovementioned caveats, let's say on average, I read about 75 books a year. That's about six a month, or one and a half a week, which sounds reasonable as an overall average. I definitely spent more time reading when I was young than I do now (I had virtually no life outside of books), and read more quickly, but I also reread a lot more.

So, if I started at age six, we come up with 1,650 individual books (probably not counting picturebooks at all). Huh. If anything, I'd guess that's a low estimate (keeping in mind that the large majority of all the books I've ever read are children's/YA books). And this doesn't factor in newspaper or magazine reading, or almost any kind of online reading.

Going by those numbers, if I live to be 90, I'll probably read fewer than 5,000 additional books. Given how many wonderful books there are in the world, that's kind of disheartening... makes me want to be even more choosy than I already am. Maybe the number will go up if I go back to grad school? Anyway, when I was a little kid, I'd finish every book I started whether I liked it or not, perhaps out of a misguided sense of loyalty. I don't do that anymore. I don't reread very often, either. There's just not TIME...

What about YOU? How many do you think you've read? How many more would you like to read before you die?

Books Read in 2007 (undoubtedly incomplete, but what can you do?)

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:13:50 GMT

Based on this list I estimate it at about 75 books (more than thirty fewer than last year! ack! clearly I need to be back in school), but there are probably a number missing. I know for sure I reviewed a more books than I have listed here; and I almost certainly also read some more books for pleasure that I've forgotten.

Middle Grade:
The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron (good, and the kerfuffle over it was fun)
The Wednesday Wars, Gary D. Schmidt (a favorite, despite accusations it could never appeal to children -- luckily I'm not one, I guess)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling (a favorite, naturally)
Into the Wild, Sarah Beth Durst (a favorite, despite being similar to many other fairy-tale world books I've read)
The Dark-Thirty, Patricia McKissack (spooky!)
The Little White Horse, Elizabeth Goudge (I think you have to grow up on this one to love it)
The Last Dragon, Silvana De Mari (good, but I'm not sure why it was quite so hyped)
The Game, Diana Wynne Jones (should have been longer!)
A Drowned Maiden's Hair, Laura Amy Schlitz (great fun)

Middle Grade Audiobooks:
A Mango-Shaped Space, Wendy Mass (synaesthesia is really interesting)
The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan (I don't know whether to count this series as a "guilty pleasure" or not, but I did enjoy them, and they go super fast)
The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan (even better than the first)
The Titan's Curse, Rick Riordan (not enough Annabeth)
Larklight, Philip Reeve (a really good performance)

Young Adult:
Tantalize, Cynthia Leitich Smith (schlock but quick and fun)
Just In Case, Meg Rosoff (weird... I think I'll write a paper on it)
Parrotfish, Ellen Wittlinger (good -- she seemed to really understand some trans issues)
Fairest, Gail Carson Levine (disappointing -- maybe I should have listened to the audiobook, if there is one; maybe then I'd have gotten the "singing" experience more)

Young Adult Audiobooks:
A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb (spooky, intriguing, a good performance)
The White Darkness, Geraldine McCaughrean (a favorite -- the performance was almost unbearably poignant)
Just Listen, Sarah Dessen (derivative of Speak but still decent)
The Off Season, Catherine Gilbert Murdock (a favorite -- even better than the first, as the character undergoes more hardship and becomes more sophisticated)
King Dork, Frank Portman (it reads not so much like realism and very much like a high school geek's fantasy world, but I enjoyed it, particularly the portrayal of the psychotherapist; also, in the audiobook, you actually get to hear his songs)
An Abundance of Katherines, John Green (a favorite -- funnier and, I thought, much better constructed than Looking for Alaska)
Specials, Scott Westerfeld (fascinating ending! I guess I'll have to read the next one as well)

Poetry & Plays:
Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath, Stephanie Hemphill (a favorite -- lord but this was beautiful)
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, Laura Amy Schlitz (a favorite -- so glad it won the Newbery!)
The Braid, Helen Frost (really lovely)
Street Love, Julius Lester (for some reason I found it forgettable)
The Underpants, Carl Sternheim, translated/adapted by Steve Martin (funny!)

Nonfiction:
Mutiny on the Bounty, Patrick O'Brien (interesting)
The Story of Salt, Mark Kurlansky (now I don't have to read the grown-up version of the book, right?)
Sightseers: Aztecs & Incas, Sue Nicholson (silliness)
History News: The Aztec News, Philip Steele (more silliness, but fun)
The World Made New: Why the Age of Exploration Happened and How It Changed the World, Marc Aronson and John W. Glenn (I thought this was a really interesting take on the topic)

Picturebooks, Comics & Graphic Novels:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick (see previous post)
The Beatrice Letters, Lemony Snicket (I can't believe I haven't finished The End yet, despite having a copy personally signed to me)
Dream-of-Jade: The Emperor's Cat, Lloyd Alexander (I love everything he does)
The House Gobbaleen, Lloyd Alexander (a funny folktale, illustrations o.k.)
The Plain Janes, Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg (a favorite -- really smart and well-executed -- and hey, I randomly met Cecil's brother in a T@F show!)
Lisa's Story: The Other Shoe, Tom Batiuk (a favorite -- but so much sobbing...)
Various Angel graphic novels (like the Buffy graphic novels, they get better as you go on in the series)
Buffy Season 8 so far, Joss Whedon et al (awesomeness, but not enough story per issue -- one or two of the issues have had, like, 2-4 extra pages and were STRIKINGLY more satisfying)
Flight Volume 3 (cool stuff, I should read the others)
Alice in Sunderland, Brian Talbot (BOY did this take me a LONG TIME to read -- aren't graphic novels supposed to be fast? enh. weird.)
Babymouse: Queen of the World!; Babymouse: Our Hero; Babymouse: Beach Babe; Babymouse: Heartbreaker; and Babymouse: Rock Star!, Jennifer Holm and Matthew Holm (so much fun, and the formula doesn't bother me)
To Dance: A Ballerina's Graphic Novel, Siena Cherson Siegel and Mark Siegel (really neat; what age is this for? I was confused)
1001 Nights of Snowfall, by Bill Willingham (lord but I love him)
Castle Waiting, Linda Medley (a favorite -- SO GOOD!)
Astro City: The Dark Age, Kurt Busiek (more! more! more!)

Actual Adult Books:
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, Michael Patrick MacDonald (good; made me sad)
After the Quake, Haruki Murakami (fascinating, thought-provoking)
Of Mice and Men (audiobook), John Steinbeck (I wish I could see the play version -- I even didn't know it was originally a play, but somehow I could tell while listening to it that it fit that form)

For Reviewing:
*The Swan Maiden (Heather Tomlinson); *Avatars Books 1 & 2: So This Is How It Ends, Shadow Falling (Tui T. Sutherland); Molly Moon, Micky Minus, and the Mind Machine (Georgia Byng); The Faerie Path Trilogy: The Faerie Path, The Lost Queen, The Sorcerer King (Frewin Jones); Kiki Strike: The Empress's Tomb (Kirsten Miller); *Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer (Laini Taylor); Saving the Griffin (Kristin Wolden Nitz); Come Juneteenth (Ann Rinaldi); The Book of Lies (James Moloney); Jango: Book 2 of the Noble Warriors (William Nicholson); The Mortal Instruments Book 1: The City of Bones (Cassandra Clare); Glint (Ann Coburn); Demonkeeper (Royce Buckingham); The Darkest Age Book 2: The Book of the Sword (A. J. Lake); Choices (Deborah Lynn Jacobs)
*Starred review books are the ones I particularly enjoyed -- not that the others are necessarily bad -- though some are! Even of the good ones, none quite make it onto my "favorites of the year" list.

Meandering on the ever-sticky topic of "censorship vs. selection" of children's books

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:23:55 GMT

So this line of thought was prompted by The Edge Annual Question of 2008. The headline was followed by the quote: "When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science." The question: What have your changed your mind about in 2007, and why?

My change of mind probably falls under the "philosophy" category. I was motivated to seriously reconsider two of my long-held assumptions by a discussion on the same listserv that provided me with the link to The Edge question, child_lit. Censorship (specifically, the "censorship vs. selection" debate) in children's literature is a very messy issue. What's censorship -- repressing texts you object to -- and what's selection -- choosing the best texts for your child to encounter? After all, a library can't hold, nor can a parent purchase, nor a bookstore sell, nor a teacher assign, every book. So no matter how you feel about censorship, selection is going to be necessary, and these processes are two ends of the same spectrum. So where do you draw the line?

In children's lit these arguments continually resurface and have a tendency to go round and round and round. But for the most part, two basic assumptions underlie all discussions of censorship vs. selection of books and other material for children:

1. Children should not read things that will cause them anguish, fear, or despair, unless it is necessary for them to encounter these ideas and feelings for educational purposes (i.e. learning about the Holocaust, terrorists, the massacre of the Native Americans, etc).

2. Parents have the ultimate right to decide what their own children should and shouldn't read.

Nearly everybody takes these assumptions for granted when discussing censorship/selection. I dare say many of you do. I did. But like all obvious, common-sense, who-could-possibly-disagree assumptions, these two need to be articulated, examined, and questioned.

First. The question needs to be asked: why is inducing negative feelings in a child only appropriate if it is necessary/educational? In your pleasure reading, as an adult, do you ever pick up a book that doesn't make you feel good? Sometimes you'll put it right down again (as will many children, who usually have mental self-censoring protections in place anyway) -- but sometimes you won't, for reasons that may be difficult to articulate.

I do think it's possible that sometimes reading a book that makes you cry or gives you nightmares or even damages your optimism/faith in mankind/hope for the future can be a worthwhile experience, without being something you'd call an educational experience. [sidetrack] Unless you want to argue that ALL experience is "educational," in which case, if you agree with #1, presumably you have no reason not to give a child any book; but this is not how most people selecting books for children would define it. And perhaps that's a big part of assumption #1 that ought to be questioned: well, what, exactly, is educational? Who gets to decide what is and isn't necessary for children to learn? [/sidetrack]

OK, so when/why might a negative reading experience be a good thing? Well, it may help you discover what you don't like so you can avoid it in the future. It may give you a baseline to compare other books against. It may allow you to participate in a conversation with your friends, who've all read the book. It may allow you to direct some of your chaotic negative feelings towards a source, and thus better understand/control them. Or maybe you like feeling very scared, or very sad, or even very hopeless sometimes. Do you ever wake up from a nightmare in a panic, and spend the day telling people about it? Did it maybe even continue to haunt you for months or years to come? And if so, is it necessarily an experience you would choose to erase if you could? If nothing else, it broadens your understanding of yourself, your own emotional range, your experience of life.

And if any of this logic applies to adult pleasure reading, why not to children's?

For the second question, consider: my parents didn't choose or screen every book I read as a child, nor would I have wanted them to, because I can assure you there were some that it would have disturbed even my extraordinarily liberal parents to know I was reading. Of course, they were fully aware of the possibility -- actually, the likelihood -- that their children were going to read things they personally wouldn't necessarily approve given the opportunity, and yet they let us have free rein in the library anyway, taking the risk that sometimes we'd read things they wouldn't like, trusting us to by and large choose wisely for ourselves. And mostly we did, but heck, we sure made dumb choices sometimes too, and read stupid or upsetting books. (The works of V.C. Andrews? Geez, scenes from those books come back to me ALL THE TIME, 15 years later.)

Yes, I sometimes read things that I immediately wished I could unread (not V.C. Andrews, though -- I read 'em all by choice). It's quite likely that if my parents had chosen to closely monitor our reading and had realized when I was about to read something like that, they could have protected me from it. But then I wouldn't have learned to protect myself from making a selection like that... also, it occurs to me, maybe they did protect me from books sometimes, and I've just forgotten. I'm not saying that's bad! But some things are always going to slip under the radar. Especially things that come from the children's book section, which ought to be "safe" -- and in fact that's what many of the outraged parents object to when these censorship debates arise, not that a book they disapprove of is in the library at all, but that it's in a section they thought was safe (ex. Daddy's Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies in the picturebook section).

But in retrospect, I'm glad that my parents let us read the way they did, largely unmonitored (but encouraged and expected to talk to them about anything/everything I read, particularly anything that disturbed or upset me). I would not, at this point, even erase the mistakes in selection I made and the negative reading experiences that resulted; they are part of me and my memories now. Perhaps more importantly, we three sisters just read too fast and too much for them to POSSIBLY have been able to screen everything we picked up. My parents also trusted the librarians to help us select books, knowing that the librarians often made better choices than they would have if they had insisted upon doing it themselves, because knowing a lot about the books in the library and recommending them is part of the whole point of librarians.

So: if a librarian (or teacher) had given me a book my parents didn't approve of (and this happens ALL THE TIME, and is frequently what triggers the insistence that the parents should always have the final say), whether we're talking scenario a) I hated it/was upset by it, or scenario b) I loved it/incorporated ideas my parents hated (we're being pretty theoretical in my own case -- but in many families these scenarios are all too likely), would my parents then have had the right to yell at the librarian and get her in trouble, for failing to uphold their trust?

And what if the parents are vicious anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, and their kid comes into the library and whispers to the librarian that he'd like to read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit because his friend liked it but please don't tell his parents?

So part of what it comes down to: why should parents always be the ones to decide what their children can and can't read, when a) their personal knowledge and experience of children's books will by default limit what they can approve of, while a librarian is making selections/recommendations from a much deeper pool of knowledge, and/or b) you don't agree with the choices they make as parents? If you'd rescue an abused child, or comfort a neglected child, why does it automatically put you in the wrong to give a child a book you know or suspect their parents wouldn't like, when their reading and thinking is being negatively repressed? Why do we have this assumption that it's right that a child should only be allowed to be exposed to the ideas her parents specifically approve of, and if we disagree with some of those ideas there's simply nothing we (her teacher, her librarian, her best friend's mom), can do about it? Where do the child's own rights and wants and needs even enter into this question?

Now, I'm not saying I think these arguments ought to convince you, or anyone; I'm not even saying I've totally convinced myself. What I'm trying to get at here is not that the two assumptions ARE WRONG, but that I think questions need to be asked, thought about, and talked about.

COMMENT THREAD (REPOSTED)

aging_parents
2008-01-04 09:20 pm
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

writinghood
2008-01-04 09:28 pm
That's very good... Would you agree with my description of your choices as parents regarding your children's reading? I'm keeping in mind the possibility that I'm not remembering it all correctly.

aging_parents
2008-01-04 10:36 pm
Pretty close. It is possible that some of what you read, had we known of it, we would have attempted to keep you from doing so (easier said than done); but these would I imagine have been on the grounds of haunting graphic imagery, rather than, as many parents attempt, on the basis of ideas that we disagree with. Though some of Kahlil Gibran's phrasing may be corny, the passage above expresses our basic belief: it is not the purpose of parenthood to try to turn out cookie cutter copies of oneself, but to help children prepare to become integrated, non-crippled adults. If that involves ending up with a few ideas that the parents find heretical, so be it.

aging_parents
2008-01-04 10:44 pm
My rule of thumb was from my father: if children can understand a book, they should be allowed to read it; if they can't understand it, it won't hurt them. (This was his response to a Syracuse Public Library librarian who questioned us being allowed to read books from the Adult section while in elementary school.)

This does presuppose good communication between parents and children, which we worked at fostering. Anything you read that you think I might have censored (or non-selected) either represents things you yourself learned to censor (graphic horror which caused your nightmares) or maturing sexuality which I didn't care to know the details of.

Being a voracious reader myself, I usually read at least a sample of what you girls were reading, whether you noticed or not. Sometimes I commented, sometimes I kept quiet.

writinghood
2008-01-04 10:58 pm
> Anything you read that you think I might have censored (or non-selected) either represents things you yourself learned to censor (graphic horror which caused your nightmares) or maturing sexuality which I didn't care to know the details of.

That pretty much hits the nail on the head, in describing the kind of dubious books I'm referring to. When it comes to graphic horror/violence, I almost certainly read things you would have protected me from had you known, and in fact I would have been grateful for it because those experiences were painful; the only thing is, I would have had to select something along those lines for myself and then regret it at SOME point in my life, in order to learn how to avoid them.

Some of the awful things I read (and there really aren't that many, I just tend to remember them very vividly) are burned into my memory and I've been known to still have a nightmare about them once in a while. It's just that I've come to see that experience as inevitable, ultimately not preventable, for me. And thus these "bad" reading experiences had to happen at some time in order for me to have something to define my "good" experiences with.

So... did you read any of the V.C. Andrews? Lord but that stuff was trash! Everyone I knew was reading it, though.

aging_parents
2008-01-05 01:43 pm
I'm sure I looked at some V.C. Andrews – but I didn't read any. I never cared for horror, and I can recognize trash with a brief perusal!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

lillibeth
2008-01-04 11:54 pm
Those are some interesting perspectives. One that I think you're overlooking, at least in this summary, is the idea that it is actually important for children to read scary stories, that it is how we confront fears and process them.

Another--and I'm not espousing it, just raising the point--is that it is the parents who are *responsible* for the child. The librarian can raise questions, doubts, fears, viewpoints, etc. but isn't the one who's going to be there when the kid can't sleep, or have to answer awkward questions the parents aren't ready to answer, or deal with the child running away from home over an adolescent crisis of faith.

As a new mom, I'm starting to have to think about this. A Child's Goodnight Book is wonderful, until the last page, which has a prayer that I disagree with on a number of philosophical points. For now, we can skip that page, but it brings up the fact that we will have to deal with these things. I don't particularly look forward to a librarian telling my child that homosexuals are damned to hell or that black people just aren't as intelligent as white people, or giving her books that suggest such a thing. Unlikely in this neck of the woods, but still possible and the sorts of things I pose to myself as questions. Would I try to get the librarian fired for doing this sort of thing? Probably not, but I would probably talk to him/her about how unhappy I was with the recommendations and possibly discuss with her superiors whether or not the choices were appropriate.

writinghood
2008-01-05 12:32 pm
Oh, yes, some excellent points. I believe it is generally thought (at least by the people I tend to have these conversation with) that children do need scary stories -- I've heard parents tell anecdotes about reading their children, say, cleaned-up versions of Little Red Riding Hood in which the wolf, having locked granny in the closet and threatened Little Red, is merely "scared" by the woodsman and runs away -- only to have their children wake up with nightmares about the wolf coming back another day to enact his revenge.

Bruno Bettelheim (whose 1970s theories are much discredited yet still enormously influential -- and fascinating), author of The Uses if Enchantment, would certainly agree. And you're right, this idea does factor into the censorship/selection debate, because you'll absolutely get parents complaining about even fairly ordinary, traditional books being "too scary." I think I was focusing more on the debates over the Big Ones, the kind of books with controversial enough content to give even very literary parents and ChLit professionals pause for thought.

And yes, your other point about parents being the ones ultimately responsible is quite right; I didn't think of saying it specifically. Possibly on some level I was taking it for granted? In any case, like my other arguments, whether one agrees or disagrees, the point is important and needs to be raised as part of the discussion. So thank you for that, and for the rest of your excellent, thoughtful comment.

lillibeth
2008-01-05 12:53 pm
I tend to like Bettelheim, too. Not so much as an authoritative "this is how children are" voice, but as providing a lot of interesting ways to think about childhood. In The Good Enough Parent he talks about parenting as sort of a final exam on your own childhood, a way to re-visit resonant scenes from a different perspective and have the opportunity to understand your parent's choices and decide whether to reinact them or make a conscious choice to change the script. I find that a valuable perspective, not only as a parent, but as a way of mentally re-considering my own upbringing.

Thanks for all the food for thought!

ALA Awards

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:32:51 GMT

So I was pleased to find that I've already read the Newbery (Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village), Caldecott (The Invention of Hugo Cabret) and Printz (The White Darkness) medal winners this year, as well as a couple of the honor books (The Wednesday Wars, Your Own Sylvia). I really loved the Newbery winner, and it is a mold-breaker -- a collection of dramatic monologues -- and the Printz winner and the honor books were also favorites of mine, all real gems.

But while I did like Cabret, I'm dealing with the vague irritability that comes when you liked something, and perhaps even thought it was groundbreaking -- but not quite as much as everybody else seems to, and you're not quite sure why. On the other hand, it's not like I had another favorite I was championing (I haven't been keeping up with picturebooks at all). And I suppose it is nice to see them honoring something really different -- last year's winner, Flotsam, was certainly wonderful, but not so stunningly different from the 3 or 4 other books Wiesner had already won Caldecott medals for.

Irritating mainstream media quote of the week, from Newsweek's interview with Brian Selznick:

NW: In "Hugo," your pictures give new information, rather than just illustrating what the words have already told the reader. Is that a first, and how did you come up with the idea?

BS: I can't say if it's a first. It's not something specifically that I had seen myself. I was trying to figure out how to tell the story in a way that would be best for the story itself. It came out of the movies that I watched and out of the picture books that I've made, and because I wanted the book to really be like a movie.

The degree of cluelessness demonstrated here by the Newsweek interviewer is stunning. As for Selznick, who is certainly not clueless when it comes to discussing children's books, I can only hope he assumed that the reviewer meant to add "Other than in virtually every picturebook ever written, of course -- I just mean a 'first' in terms of illustrated books for older readers," and answered the question accordingly.

I did find out from this article they're planning to make a movie of it. Should be interesting, as it essentially already is one. And Scorsese to direct? Really? I hope he has the same admiration for silent films that Selznick does, or it's sure to be shite.

Now you listen here!

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:51:52 GMT

There's a debate on a listserv I read about whether or not children who listen to audiobooks (full, unabridged books, mind you!) instead of reading ought to be disqualified from a summer library "reading race" program, on the grounds that they are "cheating." Some posters have made reference to a New York Times article about people who were enraged to find that members of their book clubs were "cheating" by listening to audiobooks instead of slogging through the printed text like everybody else.

Early on, the quite legitimate point is raised that listening and reading are interrelated yet nevertheless two different skills, and schools (schools, note, not libraries!) have a responsibility to teach children to read. (But no responsibility to teach them to listen, I guess? Or is it assumed that everyone automatically does that well, without having to learn it?)

But so many of the other arguments being raised seem to totally miss that point. There's the assertion that listening leads to inferior comprehension. The declaration that if audiobooks are allowed in summer reading programs, they might as well allow TV and video games too. The comparison that listening to book is like appreciating music (important but easier), while reading books is like playing music (ultimately leading to a superior understanding of music, but harder). The odd suggestion that listening to books is necessarily a passive experience, as opposed to reading, an active experience. And the almost unchallenged assumption that listening is simply an inferior, less vital skill. Oh, and kids don't learn to spell. And couldn't possibly understand concrete poetry that way!

People make that first point about reading and listening being related but different skills, and then their arguments go off in random directions that seem to fail to take that point into account. Okay, so, I love to read print, have always devoured books that way, ever since I was eensy. I stopped wanting my parents to read aloud to me because I could read silently much faster. But in my adult life, I decided to learn to listen to audiobooks (because I desperately needed to fit in even more book time!). I began training myself by listening to books I'd already read (Charlotte's Web narrated by the author; The Series of Unfortunate Events with the marvelous Tim Curry). As I developed the ability to concentrate, I graduated to unfamiliar books -- short, fluffy ones at first, but eventually moving on to massive works like His Dark Materials and The Book Thief. And I got better and better at it as I went along.

Yeah, it took work. It wasn't something I'd ever been taught to do, not formally. But now that my listening skills have really improved, I think my comprehension and appreciation of books via each method is virtually identical. I tend to have slightly different emotional responses depending on how I receive the books (I feel more personally connected to characters who are talking directly to me), but my ability to understand and analyze them is the same. I got through the last year of grad school reading about half the books and listening to the other half, and I can assure you, it didn't make much of a difference as to how well I was able to use the book academically or discuss it in class (except that I'd sometimes have trouble finding page numbers to make a point). In both cases, I'd engage with the words actively, and create my own interpretation.

Now, many people don't process audiobooks as well as print, and for them listening is a subpar experience. But to then extrapolate that of course that means that listening is simply an inferior method of digesting a book for everyone is unwarranted. Because there are also people out there who process audio much better than print -- have better comprehension, better retention, significantly more enjoyment that way. To a certain extent, both skills need to be learned and practiced, neither is inborn; I honestly feel like I can do both equally well by this point (which did NOT used to be the case). However, I also can believe that many people have strong natural inclinations in one direction or the other, and can't learn to do both equally well. And that's fine! I don't think being unbalanced in that way is a fault or a problem, as long as you can do both well enough to function in society.

But somehow, society's decided that the people who process print well (and audio less well) are "readers," while people who process audio well and print less well are not. As it is, I know a lot of readers who feel strongly that audiobooks are a fluffy, lazy, inferior way of receiving books (even when they do enjoy listening to them), and relatively few people who would claim the opposite, that listening is superior. But is that because more people process print better than audio -- or is that because audio processors have all been convinced, since childhood, that they aren't "readers" and never will be?

Sure, kids can listen to audiobooks, not really take them in, and claim they've "read" them. But they can do that reading print as well -- it's called skimming. If you want to know how well a kid understands a book, quiz 'em on it (or have a conversation). And of course it's true that you can't understand concrete poetry through listening; but on the other hand many people argue you can't really appreciate most poetry (or plays) simply through reading. Different texts seem to be more or less complemented by different methods of delivery -- I can name a couple books that are particularly enriched by listening, like M. T. Anderson's Feed (which takes place in a world where people have lost the ability to read)... or Paul Fleischman's Seek, which is really a radio play, and reading the text just doesn't cut it (I mourned not being able to listen to that one, but it was only available on cassette). Also, many audiobooks find quite ingenious ways of creating an equivalent audio experience to match illustrations and other visual-only aspects of books, a substitution process I find quite fascinating in and of itself. Though I wouldn't want to try to listen to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, no matter how ingenious its substitutions are -- it seems to defeat the point.

COMMENT THREAD (REPOSTED)

rosefiend
2007-08-10 01:23 pm
I totally agree with you. Because what if you're blind? My Uncle Harold read the Bible in Braille and through audiobooks. Guess he wasn't really reading all that text after all.

I have a harder time processing stuff aurally -- I really had to concentrate at poetry readings -- whereas I skim through books and miss a lot. Technically, I'm a lazy reader. But I don't see how one would be better, oh, let's say *superior*, than the other. It's the same stuff, whether you get it through the eyes or the ears. It just gets processed differently.

But listening isn't passive. You ever listen to a radio show? It brings the imagination into play in a way that TV does not. Listening can require just as much imagination and skill as seeing, sometimes even more.

If a kid would rather listen to an audiobook, then for Christ's sake let her. Let it be included in the reading program. Those librarians need to get caught up with the times a bit.

writinghood
2007-08-10 06:04 pm
I've not only listened to, but even been in a radio show! A nigh-forgotten art, unfortunately. People complain all the time about declining reading skills, but it's been a while since I heard anyone (besides my dad) complaining about the decline in auditory skills, and how nobody these days has the attention span to sit through a whole radio show.

I'm suspicious of a lot of those panicky studies about declining literacy. They don't usually bother to track things like audiobook purchases/downloads/library circulation, nor do they generally make any attempt to include data on kids reading things like magazines, manuals, or the reams and reams of stuff they read online. A kid who read hundreds of pages of fanfic a week (regardless of whether we're talking well or badly-written fiction here) would be counted as a nonreader, and so would the kid who devoured science magazines and how-to manuals; whereas the one who read one Goosebumps book in a month would rank higher than they would on these scales.

Like I said, I'm suspicious. Still worried about literacy, but highly suspicious of all those shocking, appalling statistics they're always coming out with.

Oh, side note, to be fair, the librarians were just presenting the question. It felt like it was mostly the congoscente coming out with the anti-audiobook stuff, for the most part. I have a feeling most librarians, noticing the rapidly increasing popularity of audiobooks, are intrigued by, not necessarily scornful of, the phenomenon.

jnik
2007-08-11 10:28 am
I have a (crappy) recording of the original War of the Worlds radio drama. Also the (excellent) Star Wars radio drama, Tolkien reading excerpts from LotR, maybe one or two other things...a friend has MP3's of Hitchhiker, which I need to remember to steal. And somewhere there might still be downloads of the radio drama JMS did for sci-fi...

I think the Star Wars dramas were part of a slight resurgence when commute times in this country started going to hell, but I've found the dynamic range of a good drama is way too high to be suitable for driving. I wonder if satellite radio might be a big enough "world" to open the niche up again.

(Librarians, IMO, tend to be a pretty savvy and forward-looking lot. They've been reasonably responsive to Gutenberg, and the ALA has stood firm against censorware and similar bullshit.)

writinghood
2007-08-11 10:36 am
Agreed about the librarians. In general, the only people I let insult librarians on my blog, are other librarians. :-P I certainly did not intend, in my post, to make it sound like they were the ones crusading against audiobooks. It definitely seemed to be, rather, an elitist kinda thing.

I'm still pissed at the NYT over the whole The Higher Power of Lucky scrotum kerfuffle, for making librarians look and sound like a bunch of backwards, idiotic, petty-minded censoring fiends. (Short version: the NYT allowed, I dunno, maybe about four librarians to speak for the entire population in an article about the fact that the latest Newbery winner contained the word "scrotum" on its first page. In their article, a small group of silly people making shocked "tsk tsk" sounds on a listserv somehow turned in to "librarians yanking books from the shelves all over the country," which was, simply, patently untrue.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

spwebdesign
2007-08-10 01:26 pm
I would venture that the point of summer reading programs is to improve reading skills. Reading and listening are separate skills, though there is overlap. Many people are deficient in either or both skillset. However, using audiobooks in a program aimed at improving reading skills defeats the purpose. The stories being read are of the least consequence, as they are bound to be forgotten by most participants over time. But having the skills to be able to read at a certain level later in life is invaluable. (And that doesn't demean the value of listening or audiobooks in the least.)

The ability to decipher symbols on a page is a critical skill that not everyone possesses and that many don't possess to an acceptable level. The ability to translate sound waves into distinct interpretable sounds is another important skill set, but that's not the point.

Think of it this way. Core strength is important. Crunches help develop core strength by strengthening the abdominals. However, if one uses bad form doing crunches, one uses leg and lower back muscles to compensate. The core still gets strengthened, but the abs don't improve to the degree they would otherwise, and there are more efficient ways of improving the lower back and legs.

I'm not sure how much sense that makes, and you're probably still going to disagree, but I would be amongst the crowd that insists books be read, not listened to, for summer reading programs.

hahathor
2007-08-10 02:29 pm
I tend to agree with you. A reading class should teach reading. Not because reading is intrinsically better, but because that's what the class is meant to teach. I'm not on writinghood's listserv, so I can't talk to any of the arguments raised there, but how well students comprehend via audiobooks vs. textural books seems besides the point. In fact, if they comprehend fantastically from audiobooks, but can't process text, that's all the more reason they should have to read - in a reading class.

Now, you may argue that reading is becoming an unnecessary skill (like long division), and that students should no longer have to take reading classes (of course, if you make that argument, I'll disagree with you), but that's not the point. The point is that there's already some general agreement that reading is good - hence the summer reading class.

If it were a summer text comprehension class, or even a literature class, I'd say that students should use whatever skills and tools they have access to. But in a reading class, one should read.

Incidentally, I prefer to build core strength through compound exercises. I find that it's both more effective and more efficient for me to use my entire body holistically. However, if I were taking a class called, "Abs of Steel," I'd expect to do crunches rather than squats or pull-ups.

writinghood
2007-08-10 05:24 pm
Agreed, technically -- but we're not talking about reading classes (I might not have made that clear in my post). See my reply to spwebdesign below. I assure you, nobody, least of all me, is arguing that reading is an outdated or unnecessary skill!

hahathor
2007-08-10 05:41 pm
Sounds like we pretty much agree then, and our argument is with whoever decided to call these things "reading achievement programs." Because, really, a reading achievement program should include reading.

To go back to the exercise metaphor (since I just got back from the gym), I decided to adapt the Couch to 5K running program to swimming. It's just as good exercise, with the added benefit of not making my knees miserable. It's certainly not "cheating" or easier. But if I were to say I'm doing a running program, but in the water, I think most people would call foul on me.

And since I haven't read the thread in question, I'm probably out of line in arguing this - but hey, isn't that was teh Interwebs is all about? Voicing your opinion loud and clear with no concerns about silly facts!

writinghood
2007-08-10 06:08 pm
> And since I haven't read the thread in question, I'm probably out of line in arguing this

Not at all. Nobody who's commented here so far has read that discussion, as far as I know. And there's a reason I posted this rant here and NOT on the list, after all!

writinghood
2007-08-10 05:22 pm
Two points

One: A large part of the discussion, which I admittedly did not address above, was about what the purpose of the library summer reading programs was -- if the intention was to promote/maintain reading/text processing skills, or to promote books as something to be enjoyed out of school. The consensus was that most libraries are pursuing the latter, not the former; they don't have comprehension quizzes at the end, after all. Nobody has suggested that audiobooks replace print texts in reading classes, or that people don't need to know how to read.

Two: There is a great deal of evidence to show that being read to and listening to audio books does, in fact, boost and complement reading/text-processing skills. In and of itself. In fact, for many children, audiobooks can help jump-start slowly developing reading skills (as well as enable the children to be caught up to the other kids in terms of how many books they're familiar with even if they were late starters). In other words, audiobooks can be, not a replacement for books, but a key to the door into reading for some learners who initially found it locked.

spwebdesign
2007-08-10 05:31 pm
Re: Two points
On point one: if the purpose of the reading program is to promote reading skills, then audiobooks should not count; if the purpose is to promote books as something enjoyable, then the kids ought to be able to choose whatever format they like best, despite my personal dislike of audiobooks. In fact, if the latter, I might encourage kids to try different formats to see if one is more likely to hook them than another. In the latter case, though, I would change the name from "reading program" to "book club."

writinghood
2007-08-10 05:37 pm
Re: Two points
Heh. It was me who called it that -- I don't even know what the program was called, nor if it had a stated purpose (though many librarians on the list talked about their variations on the theme, and usually the idea was to promote books, rather than reading per say). I recall that it was, however, structured as a "race," with the person who read the most books winning; and cries of protest and "cheat!" were raised when the winner turned out to be an audiobook listener (despite the fact that except for the slowest of readers, reading text is usually MUCH faster!).

spwebdesign
2007-08-10 05:44 pm
Re: Two points
A race, huh? Now I think the whole idea behind this program is simply stupid! (No offense intended to you.) We shouldn't encourage kids to blow through books as fast as they can, running the risk that they sacrifice comprehension and enjoyment. Heck, if I were to make a contest of it, I might reward the kid who spent the most time reading the fewest number of books! Books should be savoured and relished, not skimmed!

"Per say," eh? Were you making a pun on audiobooks? Or did you mean "per se"? :p

writinghood
2007-08-10 06:36 pm
Re: Two points
> A race, huh? Now I think the whole idea behind this program is simply stupid! (No offense intended to you.)
Heavens, no offense taken. The listserv has also been abuzz with outrage for days over that whole notion, and I largely agree with them. (Some people did raise some reasonably good points in defense of that kind of program, but I'm not going to go over them, since I still ultimately end up disagreeing with them.)

> "Per say," eh? Were you making a pun on audiobooks? Or did you mean "per se"? :p
Heh. See my whole spelling vs. pronunciation discussion with kalliejenn2 below. I've always been a good speller who frequently, sometimes embarrassingly mispronounces things. Now that I listen to audiobooks, maybe I'm going the other way? :-P

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

dpolicar
2007-08-10 02:57 pm
Hrm.

So, I can't really speak to the "reading achievement" programs themselves, not really knowing what their purpose is.

I do agree with you that there's a level of snobbishness here that is just annoying... not just wrt reading vs audiobooks, music, or television, but also wrt "literature" vs "genre fiction" vs. non-fiction, and wrt the whole class of lexical activity vs, say, working on car engines or gardening or playing chess or playing soccer or learning to juggle. I sorta wish everybody would just grow up and get over it.

All of that said, though... hm.

So, it is frequently said of television that it's "passive entertainment" where one doesn't actively have to imagine stuff, and therefore worse than books.

Of course, it's also said that video games are worse than television, despite require active planning, so I often question the motives of those who say it. But, leaving that aside...

If I accept that as a legitimate complaint about TV... that is, if I accept that "passive entertainment" in this sense is worse than "active entertainment"... then it does seem to follow that audiobooks are somewhere in between.

TV keeps you from having to imagine the visual and auditory elements, but you still get to imagine the kinesthetic and tactile and emotional elements. (Of course, that's not to say you will, but the same goes for books.)

Audiobooks keep you from having to imagine the auditory elements, but you get to imagine the visual ones, as well as everything above.

Now, personally, I'm not sure I buy that this continuum means a damned thing. But it sounds like the folks on these lists have internalized it as a Very Important Thing.

Were I on these lists, I would be tempted to post, in my most snobby intellectual voice, about how that reading is a fine way to pass the time if you're into that sort of thing, but if we really cared about our children's intellectual progress we would encourage them to stop indulging in such passive entertainments as reading, where they are leaving all the plot development and characterization and dialog to someone else, and instead participate in more active mentally stimulating activities as role-playing games and writing Harry Potter fanfic.

Just to watch everyone sputter.

writinghood
2007-08-10 05:30 pm
Hah! That would be funny indeed.

I'm not sure if you're suggesting that listening to audiobooks actually is more passive than reading or not? If you are, I'd be curious to know why (she said in a non-hostile tone).

In my personal experience, I find that both kinds of "reading" are active, requiring concentration, engagement, and imagination to fully enjoy books. I wonder if a lot of the people who are putting down audiobooks as inferior simply don't listen particularly well themselves, and are having trouble believing that anybody else could.

hahathor
2007-08-10 05:46 pm
In point of fact, reading is a physical active process; your eyes make saccadic leaps, and visual stimuli engage a larger portion of your brain than auditory stimuli.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the argument, but I'm all about the pedantry.

Of course, reading does mandate a certain level of physical stillness, while you can listen to an audiobook while you're running, or building your core muscle strength. Though there is a guy I see on the bike path sometimes, power walking with his head in a book and listening to his iPod. People like that give reading a bad name. I suppose at some point I'll see him add a cell phone to the equation.

writinghood
2007-08-10 05:53 pm
> In point of fact, reading is a physical active process; your eyes make saccadic leaps, and visual stimuli engage a larger portion of your brain than auditory stimuli.

Points along these lines were sort of hinted at in the e-mail discussion as well. I agree that it's not really related to the fundamental argument, but I wouldn't call it pedantry -- it certainly is interesting! I wonder, is it possible that the reason visual stimuli engage a larger portion of the human brain than auditory stimuli is that our auditory skills are underdeveloped (as a culture, as a species?), or anything along those lines? I wonder, if you took brain scans of a self-identified strongly auditory learner listening to an audiobook and a visual learner reading one, and then vice versa, how would they all look? These would make fascinating studies.

dpolicar
2007-08-10 06:44 pm
Well, from a strictly computational "how hard is it to write the software to do this" point of view, I'd say you're absolutely right about our auditory skills being underdeveloped relative to our visual ones.

In principle, doing wave-form analysis on a sound-stream to identify previously learned words, separate signal from noise, etc. is the same sort of problem as doing OCR on a scanned page and identifying words from a dictionary.

But of course human vision does way more than that... it's not just OCR, it's this constant process of looking at everything and placing it in space and matching up perceptions of color and shape and texture and shading and completing occluded patterns and etc.

And human hearing does more than this, too, of course, but on the whole my guess is that our vision solves harder problems than our hearing does... and, consequently, we get more information from it.

Being unable to hear is extremely disorienting, but being unable to see is FAR more disorienting.

I'd be very surprised if there were much variation in this between auditory learners and visual ones, though I'd expect to see variation between deaf and sighted/blind and hearing people.

writinghood
2007-08-10 06:56 pm
> Being unable to hear is extremely disorienting, but being unable to see is FAR more disorienting.

Very true. And that puts me (randomly) in mind of the debate on your journal a while back, about the voluntarily deaf and their children... not trying to reopen the topic, just sort of boggling at the strangeness of it, as I recall it.

hahathor
2007-08-10 08:10 pm
Research on neuropsychology backs this up. Much more of the brain is engaged when you're looking at something than when you're listening. And there also appears to be more specialization. For example, there's a specific part of the visual cortex that is active primarily when you're looking at faces, and another that is active when your looking at faces you know well. The neurons in the latter area are informally referred to as "grandmother cells" because they fire when you look at your gram. So far as I know, there's not a specific part of your brain that engages when you hear a voice you recognize. There is a large part of your brain that kicks in when listening to human speech, but that's probably mostly language processing; many of the same cells react to written text as well, and they're less active when the speech is in a language unfamiliar to the listener.

[caveat]It's been over a decade since I studied this stuff, and I'm too lazy to do any research right now. Our understanding of the brain is going at an amazing clip, so it's possible that new research has rendered some or all of the above paragraph inaccurate.[/caveat]

writinghood
2007-08-10 08:15 pm
Well, that all matches pretty closely with my understanding of it. Though my reading may be out of date, too.

dpolicar
2007-08-10 06:33 pm
> I'm not sure if you're suggesting that listening to audiobooks actually is more passive than reading or not?

Well, I'm not really sure either, because I'm really not sure what we (or, really, what they) mean by "passive."

Certainly, there are things specified in an audiobook -- like the voices of characters -- which a text-book requires you to imagine. If by "passive" we mean "lets you get away with not imagining more things", then yes, audiobooks are more passive. (That mostly seems to be what people have in mind when they talk about books vs TV, so in the narrow context of that conversation, I'd say that audiobooks are more "passive" than text.)

On the other hand, a text-book lets you flip back and re-read things you missed the first time in a way an audiobook doesn't. If by "passive" we mean "lets you get away with not following the narrative carefully" then text is more "passive". For example, it's a LOT more work for me to follow an explanation that's being read out loud to me than one I can read myself.

And in neither case is it clear to me why this is supposed to matter in the least bit. As I say, mostly I think it's all just snobbishness, and worrying about it is roughly in the same vein as people arguing about whether it's better to plant annuals or perennials, or whether the mumble-mumble engine is better than the oh-look-a-bird engine, or any of the other millions of hobby-horses that people spend hours poking spikes into the eyes of.

writinghood
2007-08-10 06:58 pm
> Certainly, there are things specified in an audiobook -- like the voices of characters -- which a text-book requires you to imagine.
I wonder, though, if most people do this? When reading a book, I rarely if ever conjure up an imagined sounds of someone's voice, though I do imagine visuals extensively. Perhaps this is why I sometimes react to illustrations/book covers with an outraged "That's not what he looks like!!" but never, when I listen to audiobooks, with "That's not what she sounds like!!" (unless the voice is a REALLY annoying one, but that's rare).

hahathor
2007-08-10 08:01 pm
That's interesting. Depending on the character, I'm likely to imagine their voice, energy level, odor, etc.

OTOH, writers generally spend more time describing a character's appearance than their other physical aspects.

writinghood
2007-08-10 08:05 pm
Hmm, true. If the author takes the trouble to describe (or even just mention briefly) a type of voice or a body odor, then I'll try to imagine it. If they let it go by unmarked, I probably won't.

writinghood
2007-08-11 10:50 am
Another small point occurs to me. Unless the audiobook is being performed by a full cast of characters, listening does not excuse you from the necessity of imagining the characters' voices, other than the narrator's. Many skilled audiobook readers "do voices" for large casts of characters, to help the listener determine who's speaking, but we're still talking about one voice, speaking with different cadences or in higher and lower pitches. You're still required to extend what you're hearing with your imagination, to really get the feeling of many different people speaking.

I must say, a lot of audiobook performers are really quite brilliant in the way they do a variety of voices. It's extremely pleasurable to listen to them doing it. I'm not sure which bothers me more, now -- the people who do multiple voices, but do it badly; or the ones who read in a single, unvarying voice throughout the entire book.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

kalliejenn2
2007-08-10 03:33 pm
i agree with you amy, and also add that in the teaching world, there is so much stress on how children all learn differently - some learn better by seeing things written out in detail, some by listening, some are more visually inclined. listening to textbooks seems, to me, just another avenue to learning. i also think that even hearing "big" words increases a person's vocabulary - just by virtue of being exposed to them.

and damn, it's summer reading! it's supposed to be fun and light and fluffy!

writinghood
2007-08-10 05:33 pm
> i also think that even hearing "big" words increases a person's vocabulary - just by virtue of being exposed to them

Yes, indeed, some studies indicate that listening to audiobooks increases the vocabulary in much the same way and at approximately the same rate as reading print. The only thing audiobooks don't do is improve spelling. On the other hand, at least you learn how to pronounce the words properly. I still routinely pronounce words wrong because I learned them through reading. Is spelling them right but pronouncing them wrong automatically superior to the reverse problem, I wonder?

zendzian
2007-08-10 04:41 pm
total snobbery.

i'll post more later, after i've had a chance to read more than just the first two paragraphs, but come on, how is it that so many smart people can be so dumb (not you, obviously, the other people on the list).

my gut reaction is to say, "look. listening to the same exact text verbatim is not cheating. cliffs notes, that's cheating." how much more obvious can it be?

smacaski
2007-08-10 04:49 pm
> my gut reaction is to say, "look. listening to the same exact text verbatim is not cheating. cliffs notes, that's cheating." how much more obvious can it be?

Ditto. The exact same words are being processed, just in a different way. And some people process better aurally than visually.

I still can't get in to audiobooks, though, but that's just me.

writinghood
2007-08-10 05:46 pm
> I still can't get in to audiobooks, though, but that's just me.

I felt that way for a long time, but with some effort I did get past my block and learned to concentrate aurally. That is not meant as a criticism, however. I think I'm mainly just lucky that I was able to learn to do both. (Because of certain life circumstances, I was also desperate to be able to do it, and so very motivated -- but that's another story.)

If it were something you lamented not being able to do, I'd say give it a try, but if not, there's no particular reason you should. My whole point, after all, is that I don't think one way should necessarily be valorized above the other. And despite the differences between them, I think that as ways of absorbing texts, they're much more similar than dissimilar.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

aging_parents
2007-08-11 12:25 am
Your post started me thinking. I have been concerned for several decades about the growing phenomenon of aliteracy in America (those who can, but choose not to, read). I believe that spoken language evolved primarily as a means of social bonding within hunter/gatherer tribes, and therefore carries a heavy load of emotion with it. That is why poetry and drama work best when spoken; it is also why demagogues have always relied on speech to make insane ideas persuasive (whether in massed crowds or through radio). Sight evolved as a highly analytic sense (calculating vectors for spear tosses etc.); and when it became possible to translate language into a vehicle that could be transmitted through sight, the possibility arose that arguments might have to stand or fall on their own logic and plausibility, without aural cues to suggest appropriate emotional response. Rush Limbaugh will always prefer radio; Paul Krugman will always go with written arguments.

How does this bear on books acquired by sight or sound? Certainly, it is a complicated question. I would not value anyone's experience of an audio book unless that person had acquired listening skills and were paying attention, in the manner that you have. In that case, one can argue that a novel, which is an art of the same family as poetry and drama, could even work better in sound. I doubt that an audio book could do as well in the sciences or mathematics; an analytic work in history or the social sciences probably would also be the poorer for being aural. It is not that these things could not be picked up this way; but critical processing of sound input just does not work as efficiently as that of sight.

writinghood
2007-08-11 10:17 am
Yeah, I would agree with all that. I wouldn't want to try to listen to "a brief history of time" on audiobook -- that's something where I (and anyone!) would have to be able to go back and forth and read certain parts multiple times and flip back to earlier concepts in order to keep everything straight.

As I was writing, I was thinking about some of these things you mention (since I have heard you talk about some of them before). The one major difference between reading and listening for me is that I am likely to have a stronger emotional connection to books I listen to. Since I am reading novels or novel-like nonfiction, this virtually always enhances the experience for me.

However, since I was listening to audiobooks in school, I was also required to be analytical about them -- and I don't feel that having listened to books significantly affected my ability to do so well. I had to work heard to learn to do it (just as I had had to learn to read fiction this way), but I did learn to hold back some part of my mind while listening in order to remain critical. The emotional connection might have made that a slightly trickier process than if I were reading, but I also had much better recall and thus was more able to support my arguments with evidence, and I think it balanced out in the end (after all, it's not like I *don't* have an emotional connection with books I read on the page!).

Any book I wanted to truly know and be able to write about in depth, I would both read and listen to, probably. (One thing you can't do while listening is sticky-flag pages; you can take notes, using pause, but it's harder!) When it was for school, I always had a hard copy as well as the audio (we had to bring it with us to class), and being able to pick up the book and look at it whenever I felt compelled to understand something better, or to check for illustrations, really did enable me to know the books very well in the end.

So I think that training myself to listen to audiobooks allowed me to become a more critical listener, and to apply some of the same skills I learned in critical reading to hearing as well. I agree that they can never be the same and ultimately vision is the superior tool for critical processing (this is why writing LJ entries can be so effective for me in working out arguments and processing emotions!), but I also suspect that if critical listening were a skill taught in schools, maybe more people would be able to maintain perspective while listening to passionate demagoguery.

cypher_0_
2007-08-11 10:58 am
Or political debates? I breezily speculate that perhaps the decline of political debates as a functional element of American political life is due not only to the corrosive effect of television culture, but underdeveloped critical listening skills on the part of Americans.

Unless I'm remembering his argument from Amusing Ourselves to Death very wrongly, Neil Postman thought that the elevation of reading over listening had destroyed political debating. I've never seen this confirmed elsewhere, but he describes historical accounts of 19th century public debates between presidential candidates lasting literally for hours--with audiences sticking around and paying close attention for the entire time.

writinghood
2007-08-11 11:02 am
Hmm, interesting! I wouldn't have guessed that reading was to blame (since it's not like people have started reading the debates/speeches instead), but rather television and sound-bite culture... but maybe it's more complicated than I realized? I'd be interested to hear (or read) the argument in more detail.

cypher_0_
2007-08-11 02:03 pm
Well, the blame for people no longer listening to long debates I think he chalked up specifically to shortening attention spans (see Daddy's point below about the glut of entertainment), but earlier in the book, he discussed the kind of personal memorization skills necessary to function in a non-literate culture, skills which reading and writing let you function without. I think shorter attention spans and the ability to be lazier about remembering things are not unrelated, although they are not necessarily cause and effect.

Reading does not preclude paying close attention to an oral political debate; after all, people read during the 19th century! It's possible that mass communication does preclude the kind of political debating he was describing, and the first forms of mass communication were written. That might be why I'm linking them in memory.

I'm afraid I can't do much better than that; it's been about seven years since I read the book. But if you ever have a chance, hunt down Amusing Ourselves to Death and look for any chapters discussing oral communication.

aging_parents
2007-08-11 12:01 pm
I must admit at the outset that I have only limited respect for Neil Postman, disagreeing with him, as I recall, on a number of issues related to education (I tend to lump him into the Rousseau category of critics, believing schools are the way that society corrupts the pure and innocent Natural Man). Here I would point out the biggest difference between the 19th and 20th century: the dearth of ways to fill up one's leisure time in those days. Novels sometimes ran to 2,000 pages, the longer the better. Tent revivals were a major source of entertainment in the backwoods. Sunday sermons often lasted three or four hours. Hours-long political speeches and debates fit into this category. At the same time though, only a relatively small percentage of people might experience a worthy debate directly; the rest would depend on reading. I would say that the most important underlying reason for the decay of the political culture has been the development of 20th century propaganda (or as we like to call it in the US, advertising) techniques. Our politics have been debased just as our lives in general have been debased, by systematic and skilled manipulation of our primal emotions to get out of us what the propagandists want at any given time. Advertising at this level is far more effective when delivered aurally (whether on tv or radio) than through print. The manipulation of attitudes about Iraq is a perfect case in point: consistently far higher percentages of those who get their news primarily through radio or tv have believed Administration lies than have those who get their news through print (whether physical newspapers or online written sources). All of us have less tolerance for hours long oratory or debate, though; that's just all the alternative sources of entertainment available today -- we are glutted rather than starved.

cypher_0_
2007-08-11 01:47 pm
Oh, I think Postman's kind of nuts, but it was a vivid example that kind of stuck with me. He made the very valid point that human beings who have writing think differently than human beings who have only speech and memory, and it was interesting to see a critic who falls squarely into the television-is-destroying-us camp emphasizing the downsides of being a literate society.

I wish I still had a copy of the book; I remember it only vaguely.

writinghood
2007-08-11 01:52 pm
> He made the very valid point that human beings who have writing think differently than human beings who have only speech and memory
Very true, and so interesting to try and imagine what that must have been like! ... Man, this is the best discussion on my blog in months. It maketh me happy.

cypher_0_
2007-08-11 02:07 pm
Can you imagine what it would be like to have to remember everything you ever needed to know? Of course, a non-literate society would have to be simpler in certain respects--after all, it's not like you'd need to memorize the sixteen different passwords you need to get into your e-mail, your house alarm system, your voicemail, and grandpa's new cell phone number--but to someone as addicted to notepads as I am, it's kind of brain-breaking.

And of course, some people would still have better memories than others. Just because you need to do something to survive doesn't mean you'll be good at it.

writinghood
2007-08-11 02:11 pm
You just made me snarf coffee.

cypher_0_
2007-08-11 02:34 pm
Uh-oh. Since we live in a literate society, people will now be able to read about this incident and remember it as a society long past your individual human lifespan. How embarrassing!

On the other hand, since we as a society are moving steadily towards a less permanent form of information storage (easily lost, soon-obsolete digital memory), maybe it will be quickly lost and forgotten by lazy, fragile modern human minds.

This is nifty!

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 03:46:54 GMT

First post

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:26:52 GMT

More to come.