I am a reading monster.
I pile the words onto my plate, 3 book stacks at a time. Chewing would take too long, and I have another stack of books arriving. So, I inhale them. I float on thoughts, scenes. Vivid images spiral me into the clouds.
But once the scenes are wrung out of their potent taste, I take to the plate again. 3 book stacks. Inhale. Float. Spiral.
Then, overwhelmed by the cramming scenes in my head and overlapping voices, I starved the reading monster. Years at a time.
It’s sneaky, though. Picks up a word here and there. Disguises food under the guise of productivity. No floating, no spiraling. Now, it’s a bleak, grey root and obsession with ticking clock hands.
Recently, I’ve taken a step back and reevaluated this scale. Neither approach was working for me, so I needed something down the middle of the road.
I meddled with slow reading.
I’ve avoided audiobooks for a few reasons. 1) When I read, that is me retreating to my headspace. I don’t want a voice or another person drawing me out because they’re talking.
And more importantly, 2) I struggle to process what people are saying without seeing the words, too. (Yes, I am that hearing person who needs captions on movies). Damn, if only audiobooks had that same feature….oh, they do. *cue facepalm*
I gave City of Wishes, written by Rachel Morgan, and narrated by Arielle Delisle, a whorl. And, wow.
Who was going to tell me that audiobooks can bring the characters to life? That I could hear them like I was talking with them? And I didn’t have to spend extra mental energy trying on different accents (although that energy has now been used to keep myself from flying ahead of the narrator).
Regardless, I’m a changed reading monster.
Listening to the narrator at a set pace challenged me to paint the scene fully in my mind. To sit with it, sit with an uncomfortable feeling. Just be with it. It’s like meditating for the modern anxious office person: there’s work to be done, deadlines to meet, meetings to rush to, and you’re asking me to sit and empty my mind of thoughts?
No, not exactly.
In meditating, we don’t “empty” our mind, for one. We let the thoughts pass by without becoming the thought, without being dragged away by the thought. In narration, we highlight an oft overlooked aspect of storytelling: collaboration. Together, we tell the story. Author, narrator, me. The author writes the story in one way, the narrator casts the story in a certain pitch, and I consume it with all of my vivid imagination. This isn’t words on a paper, speech through headphones.
This is a dialogue between me, narrator, and author.
At first, it felt odd listening to a feminine voice cast a masculine voice, but as fiction and fantasy worlds do, the story hooked me in, and I suspended my real-world beliefs. It’s not a feminine voice attempting to mimic a masculine one. That’s just his voice!
While I have learned that I can enjoy audiobooks, I have found that I am very picky with who is narrating. So, like I have identified the Safe Foods for my earthly body to consume, I must now find Safe Voices for my reading monster.
Really, this brings back memories of my childhood librarian casting different voices as she read. I’d find Virginia (not because I’ve lived there, or wanted to visit but because it started with a “V”) on the U.S. map printed on the rugged carpet and fit my crossed legs within its state. Even as a wee lass, I was voracious and wanted to devour the words on the book my librarian held up. I thought she read too slow, and I was too curious, too antsy for what happens next. I did not quite appreciate the way she brought the characters to life, pitching her voice up and down, taking on accents that I chewed on for days. She has one voice for the wily, almost villainous characters that still echoes in my mind; it pitches high in a fortepiano and levels into a grumbling rasp.
I’ve read other books by Rachel Morgan before, and now I am convinced I must return to them and re-experience the story with Arielle Delisle guiding my slow reading journey.