Over at The Millions, Sam Allingham writes about his longstanding love of books on tape (or in modern parlance, audiobooks).
At its best, the book on tape leads the listener into a kind of reverie. By shifting the locus of linguistic labor onto the reader’s voice, the listener receives the vision of the story directly. I can think of nothing closer to the model of what John Gardner called “a vivid and continuous dream.” Your mind can wander, while you work. You type in this world. You live in another.
It’s no surprise, then, that Allingham is a fan of the website LibriVox, a database of public domain books read by volunteers from around the globe, available for free for our listening pleasure.
