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PM_ME_YOURPRIVATEKEY t1_j6kw60s wrote

Reply to comment by Tokenvoice in The 10 Inalienable Rights of the Reader by swedish_librarian

Then your a pedantic ass. No one cares how you consumed the book, they want to talk about the story you both are familiar with.

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Tokenvoice t1_j6le1t0 wrote

You missed the part how I said it doesn’t matter how you consumed it it seems because you came in very hot with arguing my point that you agree with. It doesn’t matter how you consumed the story just that you did.

Words matter otherwise we would be watching movies instead of reading or listening to stories. Its the difference between he landed safely and he fell safely. Shouting vs bellowing, laughing vs giggling vs chortling.

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PM_ME_YOURPRIVATEKEY t1_j6lfvtz wrote

So if someone asks me "have you read x" you're saying that you expect me to respond with "oh no, but I have listened to the audiobook." Instead of just saying, "yeah" and getting into the actual conversation? Seems dumb. Whats the functional purpose of differentiating between the two in a conversation?

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Tokenvoice t1_j6lh5pq wrote

No I don’t, my mate listens to audiobooks, I read yet quite often he will use the terms he has read. In a conversation it doesn’t matter if you’re replying, does a bit if you’re starting it which you would say hey I have been listening to this book, have you read it.

Though I would say sometimes the distinction is important because you want to talk about a specific facet of either media. Like the illustrations and maps in the book, or the way the person narrating the book pronounces names.

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Character_Vapor t1_j6nuiq9 wrote

>So if someone asks me "have you read x" you're saying that you expect me to respond with "oh no, but I have listened to the audiobook.

"I listened to the audiobook" is exactly how I respond, and then we get on with talking about it. Doesn't seem that strange to me.

Anytime you sit down to read a book, you are making a bunch of internalized decisions as a reader: the pace at which you move through the prose, how you imagine each character sounds, the tone and rhythm and inflection (akin to the "performance" of an actor) of how dialogue is delivered, the emphasis (or lack thereof) you give to different elements of the text, etc. This is the interpretive work between a reader and a text that actually constructs the narrative in front of you.

When you listen to an audiobook, you are still of course experiencing that text, but you're handing over the interpretive work of its construction to a third party. You are listening to someone else perform the book, and that person is the one making all of those interpretive choices I described above. This is not inherently inferior or "lesser" a process, but it can lead to fundamentally different outcomes, because there's an additional outside element being brought into a process that would otherwise be pretty insular. I've listened to audiobooks that I've hated, only to then read the book and have the complete opposite reaction. Conversely, I've tried to read books that I couldn't stand, only to then listen to an audiobook and have everything click into place, because the narrator was offering me a way "in" to the book that I couldn't quite find on my own.

These are all interesting and worthwhile things to consider when we're talking about the experience of literature. Clarifying the specifics of each experience is not some sort of value judgement on the so-called "validity" of each format, it's just a way to approach things with more nuance and hopefully generate further discussion.

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Character_Vapor t1_j6nsle6 wrote

>Then your a pedantic ass. No one cares how you consumed the book, they want to talk about the story you both are familiar.

It's not pedantry. Clarifying the format will lead to a better discussion, because it's context that can be kept in mind as you discuss your individual responses to a book.

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If I listened to an audiobook, and you read it, we are of course on equal footing to talk about the text, but we experienced that text in different ways. I've had discussions with friends about novels where it eventually became clear that the divide in our perceptions of it came down to the fact that one person listened to it (and therefore experienced a third party's performance of the text instead of doing that interpretive work directly), and one person read it themselves, and it affected how each of us responded to it.

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PM_ME_YOURPRIVATEKEY t1_j6nss6m wrote

Perhaps the discussion I have with my friends are very different from the discussions you all are having with yours, but for my situation they are functionally identical.

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Character_Vapor t1_j6nxwl6 wrote

>but for my situation they are functionally identical.

Good for you, but that doesn't make the people who want more extensive discussion a "pedantic ass" just because they think the distinction is relevant.

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PM_ME_YOURPRIVATEKEY t1_j6o4an7 wrote

Agree to disagree. If you see something online or hear about it via a text message do you say "I heard" because then you're wrong by your metric.

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Character_Vapor t1_j6o5bfq wrote

Are you seriously comparing the complete experience of a continuous, immersive text like a novel to reading a text message? I've already elaborated in another comment to you why I think the distinction is relevant in terms of the two formats, so I'm not sure why you're trying to flatten down all nuance by equating the entire thing to snippets of text on your phone.

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PM_ME_YOURPRIVATEKEY t1_j6o606c wrote

So pedantry it is then.

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Character_Vapor t1_j6o7qdm wrote

It's not pedantry to point out that it's possible to have a completely different reaction to a text when you hear someone else read it vs. reading it yourself. I don't make that distinction to shut people down or make a value judgement (I've made that clear multiple times), I make that distinction because it has the potential to give two people even more to talk about when it comes to a given book.

Do you have any interest in actually responding to anything I've said with elaboration of your own, or are you just going to repeat the "pedantry" thing over and over again with zero substantive analysis? It seems like you're just throwing that out because you have a reflexive disinterest toward the idea that anyone would even consider a book in that way, so you respond by just dismissing it entirely as pedantry. It's akin to someone wanting to talk about the way that decanting wine can affect the taste, and you just writing it off as irrelevant and tedious fussiness solely because you've never thought about wine in that way yourself.

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