Last month in The Atlantic, Sam Apple wrote an essay, “Tolstoy and Chill,” about audiobooks’ recent uptick in popularity. He considers how listening to a book changes the way we experience it: audiobooks are more passive and relaxed than reading a physical book. This passivity, he notes, means that audiobooks just aren’t conducive to deep reading and “critical reflection.” Apple’s fascinating argument is that audiobooks’ more chill approach to reading is actually a good thing, not something to shun as unserious or lazy.
Apple’s insights point to deeper truths about novels as a genre, and the misguided ways we sometimes approach them. Reading, especially works of fiction, is supposed to be an activity of leisure. Instead, it has become laborious for many people thanks to a variety of causes, such as the influx of digital technology. By making the reading process lower-effort and lower-key, audiobooks can help recover the leisurely spirit in which novels are meant to be read.
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