"Reading" While Road Tripping

    
    

     Recently, I concluded driving 2,215 miles in a road trip, IL to FL and back. I consider this an accomplishment given that Anita and I traveled safely, had no car trouble, no cop trouble. The driving itself was aided and abetted by a rediscovery of the recorded book.

     We both had been users of audio tapes in days when we drove to and from work on a regular basis. It might take a week to hear all of a novel but the cassette functioned ably (and actually surpassed the upstart CD in ease of replaying a bit that you needed to hear again). Now that work has been set aside, we find that long drives offer the continuous time span in which a narrative can unfold and unfurl. You preclude the monotony of driving a long distance by listening to a complex or suspenseful text, and when you are with another person the experience is a dynamic rather than a static sharing.

     Much depends on the audio book you choose. The most successful “listen” we selected was Great House by Nicole Krauss, a lauded work of contemporary literary fiction. It centers on a desk that occupies space and attention in the lives of different people. They are bound to each other—even when they are strangers—by the force and form of the desk and its connection to the past and to loss. The characters and the book itself become integral to the “great house” of memory, evoked by the phrase in the Books of Kings, quoted toward the end of the novel: He burned the house of God, the King’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire.

     Listening requires concentration, especially when the text is dense and polyphonic. What the unabridged recording sets before you is not so much a theater of the mind—that is what happens when you read visually. But listening to the spoken voices of five narrators who are guided by a director puts you into the posture of an attentive audience engaged by successive monologues.   And Great House, narrated by five actors under the guidance of a director, prompts you and your partner to pause the recording periodically in your drive to “compare notes” on theme and tone, references and allusions, and the impact of voices and pauses. It’s like being in a book club for two, where you don’t have to be taken away from the text at hand to feign sympathy for others’ personal recital of aches and pains and neglect by grown children.

     “Reading” Krauss’s novel in this way was so enjoyable, I ordered the printed book when we got back home. Now, at another time, I can revisit how we heard it together, and read it again for the first time.