audiobook – Words Deferred

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I first discovered Amal El-Mohtar as the co-author of This is How You Lose the Time War with Max Gladstone. (I’ll even take the hipster cred of loving that book years before it was cool.)

With any multi-author work like that, I always wonder how I’ll feel about the things that come later. Much like a great song with a featured artist, you never quite know if it’s the band, the guest, or some unreproducible magic in the collaboration itself.

However, I’m pleased to report that even though it is very different, I enjoyed El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots just as much as that previous book.

Audio Considerations

There’s no question that different formats can have an impact on the experience of a book. I first “read” Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy as an audiobook, and recently re-read the first book, Annihilation, in paper. It’s a dense and challenging book in places, and I found the ability to easily re-read and compare previous pages allowed me to take in more of the information on the page. On the other hand, the audiobook forced my attention and lent a certain claustrophobic feeling to parts of the story that was in many ways complimentary to the text.

I also “read” The River Has Roots as an audiobook. It’s worth noting that this audiobook includes set-dressing in the form of gentle background noise: a burbling river, a bustling market, a whispering forest. This background audio is done well, and suits the story nicely. After my initial surprise, I never found it overbearing or distracting.

Songs are an important theme of the story, and these are fully sung. I was delighted to find out after the fact that the music was actually performed by the author and her sister, including harp and flute parts. These elements put it somewhere between audiobook and radio play.

Finally, I’ll note that the narrator has a strong accent — my uninformed guess was Irish, although one of the book’s blurbs suggests that it’s “rural English.” As an American, I found myself needing to pay a little more attention than usual at the beginning of the story. By the end, I had no problem following whatsoever. The narrator, Gem Carmella, convinced me that the audiobook wouldn’t have been quite so effective without her voice.

The River Has Roots isn’t a long book. It’s listed at 144 pages. My audio edition claims a length of 3:53, but a full hour of that is actually a preview of El-Mohtar’s upcoming book of short stories.

I’ve said before that I appreciate the trend toward more acceptance of novellas in recent years, although I’d confess that I have a tough time justifying the purchase of a hardback book of that length for the $24 list price. Luckily, the audiobook was a steal on end-of-year holiday sales, and is still less than half the price of the hardcover.

A Modern Fairy Tale

The fantasy genre has come a long way. Even for those who still ape Tolkien, a significant amount of codification and shorthanding has occurred. And in backlash against that, all sorts of sub-genres and new offshoots have emerged. For the most part, modern fantasy feels quite different from ancient myths and folk stories that have been handed down more or less intact across centuries. Even if they do share certain key features.

The River Has Roots is very much trying to evoke the feeling of fairy stories, and I think it succeeds. Part of that is having the right kinds of imagery and road markers: a world just like our world, where magic is accepted as real. Sisters living in close proximity to a Faerie land. Songs with power. Witches and secret lovers and villainous suitors who are really just after the family fortune.

Beyond those many surface-level things that are easily recognizable as “things that fit into fairy stories,” there is a certain mode of speech, a certain way of unfurling the story that also contributes to this feeling. In The River Has Roots, magic is called grammar, and wizards are grammarians. El-Mohtar has found the magical grammar of the fairy story and deployed it perfectly here.

It is a common trope to suggest that fairy stories are required to have a happy ending where all the wrongs are put to rights. It’s one of those truisms we accept without thought, and it’s also not true. It’s well-known that many of the Disney versions of classic stories were changed, their dark and horrible endings often considered too depressing or gruesome. I won’t spoil the ending here, except to say that it treads that knife edge well, and could perhaps be best described as melancholic.

If you’re in the mood for something short and sweet, modern and well-crafted with the feel of something older and wiser, The River Has Roots is an excellent choice.

Reading to my Kids

The first time I started regularly reading books aloud in adulthood was shortly after my first son was born. Books for the under-three crowd aren’t exactly high literature, but that’s okay. Babies aren’t discerning consumers, and I wasn’t an amazing narrator.

Still, it was clearly valuable. My oldest could turn the pages and recite his favorite books from memory long before he could actually read any words. All of our children have become voracious readers, and that literacy is an asset in school and life. Plus…you know…it’s fun to read.

My oldest child is now a high schooler, and no longer interested in me reading aloud to him. My youngest is also losing interest, although he still listens occasionally, when we find a book that piques his interest. For now, my middle child is the one who asks me to read to her. She’s a smart middle-schooler, and we mostly read adult sci-fi novels. It’s a gift to be able to share the books that I enjoyed at that age, and revisit them through her eyes.

I know those days are numbered. I suppose I’ll miss it when I no longer have someone asking me to read to them.

Reading fiction aloud for 30-60 minutes most evenings has made me much better at it. I know to shift my tone to better separate external and internal dialogue. I know to adjust my voice to differentiate between two characters in conversation. I know how much space is needed to create a scene break. Sometimes I even know when I’ve gone too far with the bad accents and silly voices.

I’m no professional narrator, but I’ve improved through 15 years of practice.

Audiobooks

I recently made a conscious effort to start “reading” audiobooks. They’re going through something of a renaissance. Enabled by the same streaming and on-demand technology that has upended movies and radio, audiobooks have also helped fill a sizable hole in publisher profits left by the rise of e-books and precipitous decline of physical (and especially hardcover) sales.

Audiobooks also happen to fit well into our current culture, where it often feels hard to sit down and dedicate time to reading, but there are still plenty of opportunities to connect a phone to the car radio during commutes, or put something on the headphones while doing laundry or mowing.

For me, including audiobooks in my reading diet has at least doubled the number of pages I consume. Maybe more. It has given me more opportunities to try new authors without adding to my overfull bookshelves.

I’ve also been slowly noticing the ways that listening to a story alters the way I perceive it. I have a harder time keeping track of different characters and remembering their names. It’s much harder to skip back a chapter and reread something for context.

Stories, Spoken

When humanity was young, storytellers were part historian, part wizard, part priest. Stories were a way for us to make sense of a confusing and malevolent world, to preserve knowledge and wisdom, and to build a shared worldview. For thousands of years, all stories were spoken.

Even in modern times, when the world is more literate than it has ever been before; even as a writer who most values the written word, there is clearly some special power in a story, spoken aloud.

Writing Advice

Some oft-quoted advice for writers suggests the value in reading your work in progress out loud.

“It will help you find the parts of your prose that sound off.”

“It will help you hear the rhythm of your words.”

“It will help you find your characters’ voices.”

“It will help you find your own voice.”

Like most writing advice, I think these pearls of wisdom will work well for some and not for others.

My opinion these days is considerably broader. As a writer, I think there’s value in consuming many kinds of stories in many different forms and formats, just as there’s value in writing drabbles, flash, novellas, novels, and series, composed by pen or typewriter or computer, or even dictation.

I think writing fiction is an activity where generalists and jacks of all trades excel. We open ourselves up to the world and gather as much as we can, so we can sift it for notes of truth to sprinkle on the page.

And I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least dabble in the original medium of stories, the only one that has persisted since before humans were recognizable as human: the spoken word.

Tag: audiobook

The River Has Roots — Read Report