MANILA, Philippines - Moby Dick is one of the undisputed classics of world literature. It’s embarrassing for a comparative literature major to admit this, but I have never read Moby Dick. I’ve tried more than once, but my brain shuts down at the evocation of life on a whaling ship. Maybe if I read it on a whaler — or on a Greenpeace boat pursuing a whaler — I could get into it, but for now I can’t seem to care about Captain Ahab’s lethal obsession. One look at the text and my eyes glaze over.
If there were some way I could imbibe Moby Dick without using my eyes, I might be able to overcome my resistance to Melville. That’s when it occurred to me that there is an alternative to reading Moby Dick: I could listen to it.
The ideal solution would be to get Colin Farrell to read it to me, since everything sounds charming in an Irish accent. However, waiting for the fateful introduction may take a while. In the meantime there’s LibriVox, audiobooks you can download for free on the Internet (Go to librivox.org or to the iTunes store). It’s like books-on-tape, minus the physical form — put it in your iPod or mp3 player and you’re good to go.
LibriVox takes literary classics, which are no longer under copyright (usually material over 50 years old), then records volunteers reading them. Since the readers are volunteers and not necessarily professional voice talents, the quality of the vocal recording varies wildly. D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love is read by a chipper lady with a British accent, while Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat comes to you in the pleasant, slightly narcotic drone of a reader named Alan Drake Davis. The English translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron is delivered by an Italian, probably for a more “authentic” feel. And one gets the impression that the reader of Moby Dick has done a little dinner theater and figures that Melville can use some more drama. After a while it doesn’t matter — you get into the rhythm of the prose and start hearing the words instead of the voice.
Of course if the volunteer readers’ voices grate on your nerves, you have the option to buy an audiobook recorded by a professional. You could also volunteer to be a reader, thus exposing yourself to the criticism of ungrateful listeners.
Given the amounts of time we spend sitting in traffic, you could probably finish most of your literary classics backlog in a few months, without turning a page. It beats being held hostage by the driver’s choice of radio station.
The New Yorker magazine has a regular fiction podcast you can download for free on iTunes. Every month, a featured author selects a short story from the magazine’s vast fiction archive, then reads and discusses it with the New Yorker’s fiction editor. Each podcast is 30 to 40 minutes long. You can hear Richard Ford read Reunions, John Cheever’s short, devastating story of a boy visiting his estranged father. Afterwards Ford explains what makes the story so effective, and mentions writing his own story as a homage to Cheever’s.
While doing the groceries, walking to appointments, or lining up for cabs, I listened to T. Coraghessan Boyle reading Bullet In The Brain by Tobias Wolff, Mary Gaitskill reading Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov, and Jeffrey Eugenides reading Spring Fugue by Harold Brodkey. On a sweltering day I took great comfort from hearing Mavis Gallant’s Waiting in the voice of Antonya Nelson. I enjoyed them so much that I’ve added them to my playlists. We listen to pop songs over and over again; why not stories?