The Power of Audiobooks

As a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a reader of all genres, I am often juggling several books at once. Currently haunting my bedside table or getting stuffed into my tote bags to accompany me during spare moments in doctors’ offices and on public transportation are Hoa Nguyen’s collection of poems A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure and John Boyne’s novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies. But I spend the bulk of my Audible credits on works of nonfiction.

I love my Audible account and listening to audiobooks. This stems from growing up dyslexic when the only books I could access were ones that I could listen to, but even since overcoming this hurdle, I believe the joys of audiobooks are apparent and shared widely by many people. First, one can listen to books while cooking dinner, walking the dog, or in the car. Audiobooks have the benefit of being communal. You can experience them with another person simultaneously, rather than reading separately at different paces. The result is a real time book club. Difficult concepts and dense materials can become more accessible through persistent speech of a narrator. Not to mention, I feel more personally motivated to trudge through detailed histories and complicated subjects when I know all I have to do is press play, give my eyes a break, and absorb the information.

My favorite audiobooks tend to be ones narrated by the author. Listening to an author read their own work adds a level of authenticity to experiencing the book. For me, this is exaggerated when it is a work of memoir, where the action in my earbuds has been actually lived by the voice relaying it to me.

Book recommendation: La Finca

For me, an example of the power of the audiobook is Corky Parker’s La Finca: Love, Loss, and Laundry on a Tiny Puerto Rican Island, winner of the 2022 Nancy Pearl Book Award for Memoir. Parker’s warm and unpretentious tone matches the casual, welcoming approach she took owning and running an inn in Vieques, an island off of Puerto Rico’s east coast. There is a tradeoff to solely listening to this particular account. The physical book is rich with marginalia. There are maps, sidenotes, collages, and illustrations drawn by the author herself. Because Parker often describes painting murals and “rugs” for her inn and coming to terms with her own identity as an artist, seeing the artwork—and not just on her website—would surely enhance the reading experience. And yet, it’s charming to hear Parker pronounce how different people say the word Caribbean—cuh-RIB-be-an or care-ib-BEE-an—humor that would be lost on the page without the aid of the auditory difference.

This is just one stand out moment where being narrated by the author improves the audiobook. As Parker recounts her divorce in the middle of her bankruptcy, she mentions a country song she finds relatable. Not only do the lyrics appear on page, but in the audiobook, Parker sings the mournful tune. Emoting so bravely and sincerely, this is an experience only for audiobook listeners. Far from cringey, this raw moment exposes the depth of Parker’s despair as well as her continuing resilience.

When Parker describes the rotating cast of inn caretakers—or is it managers? No, caretakers—I felt her stress because it is her pleading, yet still calm, frightfully earnest voice, desperate to catch a break, describing the many family moments disrupted by this frequent event. Purely reading the account of a Seattle executive who owns her own marketing firm having difficulty finding managers to run her Caribbean inn may evoke an eye roll, leading one to think sarcastically, Poor gringa, instead of feeling sympathy. However, when I heard her story, in her own voice, I empathized with her plight, like it was a friend recounting this chapter of her life to me directly. With the audiobook, I didn’t just see static black and white words. I perceived the heartfelt conflict in her voice as she grappled with her role on the island as a new age colonizer, as she strategized with how to not take from the island, but preserve the ecosystem and give back to the economy.

This is a story about deeply loving a Place. Capital P. It is why so little time is spent unpacking the profoundly devastating death of her second husband from pancreatic cancer followed by the near total destruction of the inn itself during Hurricane Maria. Those tragedies are confined to the epilogue—or possibly a second book—where their weight doesn’t pull focus from the main event. And in the audiobook, Parker’s voice, like a compass rose, is there to guide listeners towards the emotional heart of the narrative.