I’m looking at close to half an hour of standing over the stove, staring into a pot as I stir, maybe stepping away for a few seconds at a time to check on this or that, open the refrigerator and put something away, or just look out the window. I block out the impatient honks from the main road and the rushing motorbikes going way too fast for the narrow streets in my residential area. I put on my newly acquired air pods and flip through my list of podcasts. I really don’t feel like the news, or even news-spinoffs right now. Nor am I in the frame of mind for smart social science. I just want to be told a good old story.
And even better if the story is told by the one who made it all up.
The Writer’s Voice, a podcast from The New Yorker features new fiction read aloud by authors. Curated by the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Triesman, the series is a little over two years old, and now offers a cache of 95 audio stories, with a new reading added every week.
I’ve often caught stories on the podcast that I had passed over in the magazine, or have listened to stories that I had already encountered on the page, and both experiences have been interesting. A story in the June 25, 2018 issue of the magazine, “The Luck of Kokura” for instance, did not grab me in the first few sentences, but I chose to listen to the author, Gary Shteyngart, reading it for the podcast, and where the I had been unable to turn the page of the printed magazine, I did keep my ear–and my mind–on the reading. Maybe it’s a commitment one makes to listening, especially when it’s the writer’s voice calling, or maybe it is just that one is in any case not doing anything else with the time (remember, I am in the kitchen staring at simmering sambar), but I was fascinated by Shteyngart’s account of a hedge fund manager gone rogue, a sort of between-the-lines psychological study of this peculiar demographic I’ve never been able to understand: Young, Ivy-League educated, highly driven, materially-invested number-crunchers on Wall Street. A story that I had enjoyed in the magazine, “Likes” by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (October 3, 2017), came alive in a different way when I listened to Bynum’s reading, making me feel the father’s yearning to be part of his tween daughter’s world, looking for clues to it on her Instagram feed and on the drive to physiotherapy after ballet class. And of course, who would not want to hear old favourites like Zadie Smith or Jhumpa Lahiri read their work, rendered doubly lyrical by word and voice?
Of course, authors are not always the best readers, and a well-written story can become a little less than it is when rendered in an unremarkable voice (there’s a reason why Books on Tape gets actors to read!). But most readers would be willing to cut the writer some slack in this regard–and in some ways, it makes the author something of a “regular person”.
If truth be told, I’ve never been one for audiobooks. I had always assumed that listening would never quite be the same as reading, firmly believing that my seeing eye soaked in more meaning than my hearing ear ever could, that writing needed to be pored over for its elegance and power to really be felt. And yes, give me a book to hold any day over a pair of earbuds and a listening device–there is a definite pleasure in letting one’s eyes travel over a page full of well-written prose. But The Writer’s Voice gives me stories in spaces where I would otherwise not find them, and lets me bring stories into places that otherwise become tedious to occupy–like my car on an hour-long commute.
Given the content of this blog, it’s pretty clear where I stand on this. But there are writers who question the point of a book review and can be scathing about reviewers.
