The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024
by Tamara Kaye Sellman
2024 was the year I finally made it through an audiobook.
And it wasn’t any old audiobook, it was China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, with more than 24 hours of listening time.
Look, I have nothing against audiobooks. Nor do I avidly participate in that faux “listening versus reading” cage match in social media. It’s absurd, with so many ways to encounter story, that anyone can posit that it’s impossible to appreciate story if it’s not consumed as reading. It’s also ableist; many of my peers with MS need alternatives to reading with their eyes because of visual disabilities.
But in the past, I have found that listening makes me sleepy, my ADHD brain wanders, and I end up losing the plot.
This year, however, I needed some assistance. I was in the intense throes of Richard Thomas’ excellent Contemporary Dark Fiction course and one of the reading assignments was, indeed, this behemoth of a book.
I started to read Perdido early, knowing how slow a reader I am (it’s the side effect of having worked as a developmental editor… I find it challenging to read quickly now because I’m so beholden to each word choice, each sentence, each paragraph…).
But I discovered quickly that I had the same issue with reading Perdido that I do with listening to audiobooks… I kept falling asleep.
This is not to say the story didn’t grip me. It did! The words were beautiful to read besides.
I’m one of those people who likes the specific lens that genre offers, but I also crave wordplay and poetics. The language on the pages of Perdido is deliciously baroque, an experience like biting into the most sublime and delicate snowflake cookies at the holidays: perfect texture, rich flavor, memorable for a lifetime, even if the story itself is a gritty treatise on the shadows of the human condition, seasoned with a dash of vulgarity and a pinch of raw truthtelling.
It’s just that there’s no way for comprehension to take place while one is asleep!
Meanwhile, it was early gardening season. I had been listening to far too many true crime podcasts—ask me anything about cyberstalking, I dare you—so I decided to switch out and listen to Perdido while planting seeds and pulling weeds.
(Nota bene: How ironic that Miéville has been the subject of stalkers for more than a decade, something I only learned while checking out his website.)
This is the part where I jump into the collective cheer for great audiobook narrators! The voice for Perdido is the extremely busy voice actor John Lee, who did a stellar job of bringing these characters alive for me while helping me keep track of the many plot layers and metaphor that make this book such a literary feast.
I managed to finish the book over two weeks’ time by simply listening during my yardwork and then reading later that night what I’d just heard.
That seems like a lot of work, but this is no ordinary book. I’m not sure I would need to do the same for other audiobooks. But this was homework, I was supposed to be studying. It made sense to encounter these words, however I could, to best integrate and synthesize the plot. Once that’s done, it’s much easier to process things like story structure, Miéville’s editorial choices, and the book’s themes and subtext.
One of the things I appreciate about reading is seeing the spellings and the stylistics on the page, and you do lose some of that with listening.
Meanwhile, there are some pretty chonky names in this massive novel and listening helped me to know how to pronounce them with some confidence.
Win-win.
What could have been a slog of a read turned out to be my favorite book of the year… and one I want to go back and read again because, well, there’s so much to it that it deserves another pass.
This is no small thing; I’m not a person who rereads books. The only books I think I’ve actually ever reread—aside from books I loved as a child and then read to my own children—are The Vintage Bradbury and Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Since Perdido, I’ve actually only listened to one other book, one exploring the history of Hecate that was so informative that I bought the print edition for reference.
I’m back to listening to podcasts, again, during hikes and puttering in the yard, because that’s my jam.
But I think about Perdido and how it made me break my own resistance to audiobooks, and I’m glad I have that Audible account now.
Resolved in 2025: Listen to more audiobooks!
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