Ace reporting by Jessica Zellers

First, the most important part: I was in the same room as Judy Blume. Aieeee!!!

Second, a guilty confession: I don’t listen to audiobooks. I think it’s wonderful that they exist and I have absolutely no prejudice against them; it’s just that I don’t care to interact with a text by listening to it.

So this was a vital session for me. If I’m not going to listen to audiobooks, I need every bit of supplemental knowledge I can get, so that I can help library patrons. And, though the session was not about readers’ advisory per se, I still learned quite a bit that was useful. (Plus there was, you know, the Judy Blume thing.)

Mary Burkey moderated. She started by talking about a new award, the Odyssey Award, and durn if it didn’t take me three tries to spell that right. The name of the award recalls the original Greek masterpiece, reminding us that all stories were audiobooks, once upon a time. The very first Odyssey Award will be announced next year. It will go to the single best audiobook for children or young adults: anything with an audience between birth and 18 years is fair game. The Odyssey Award will be an honor on par with the Printz, the Newbery, and the Caldecott.

Cool.

Then we got to hear the three speakers. First up was Bruce Coville, a man who not only writes books but produces audiobooks. For several lovely minutes he railed on DVDs in cars. I got nothin’ against movies, but his point was very well taken: As soon as you switch a movie on in the car, you’ve lost your opportunity to interact with the kids. But put on a whole audiobook, and you’ve got something for the whole family to participate in.

It really works, he explained, describing a long car trip he took with his daughter. “When you’re crossing Kansas, Pride and Prejudice is riveting.�

Bruce posed a question to the audience, one that defenders of audiobooks are frequently called upon to defend. “Is it cheating to listen to a book?� he asked.

It depends. If the point is to force a reader to slog through written text, then yes, it’s cheating to listen to a book. But if the point is to create a personal experience with the emotional territory of the book, then it’s not cheating; it may, in fact, be even better.

Then Judy Blume talked. Astute readers will recall that Judy is my close personal friend. Um.

Judy confessed that she has limited experience with audiobooks. (See! She and I have so much in common!) Despite this, she managed to regale us with some awesome anecdotes. For instance, in 1981, she was asked to record Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. As she went along, she improvised some changes to the text.

“Um, Judy,� her producer would interrupt. “You missed a word.�

“I know,� Judy would reply. “I’m the one who wrote it in the first place.�

“But you can’t change it now.�

“Yes I can. I wrote it.�

The producer finally won.

Judy has never listened to her own books because she hates the sound of her own voice. This is too bad. I can faithfully report to you that she has a lovely voice, and also these amazing curls, though I suppose that’s neither here nor there.

One final comment from Judy: She’s never going to let a book be abridged for audio ever again. When Summer Sisters was going to be recorded, it was condensed. It was a terrible experience for Judy. All the rich details were excised. She’d rather a book not be recorded at all than to have it abridged.

Multiple Printz winner John Green was up next, with an articulate and compelling defense of audiobooks. He’s troubled by the idea that literature is written text, and only written text. Literature can contain things other than words. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was originally published with pictures, for instance. Mark Twain worked closely with the illustrator to make sure that the pictures strengthened the written words.

Green does love the written word. Traditional print text allows us to contemplate and savor words and phrases, which is difficult to do with audiobooks. Traditional print shouldn’t go away.

But audios are great in other ways. They allow us to multi-task, for instance. All those hours we spend driving are now available to us for reading.

Though John Green is a veteran commentator for NPR, he doesn’t read his own books. Why not?

Because he sucks at it. “I genuinely suck,� he said. That’s a direct quote. Honest.

A final point from Green is that upper-level YA books exist today because of the courageous collection decisions of YA librarians. He predicts the same trend for audiobooks: As YA librarians purchase audiobooks and get them into the hands of readers, audio collections will grow and become indispensable.

Finally we heard from John Gantos, who told us that recording a book is the hardest work he does. It once took him a whole day to record 750 words. Yikes! But it makes him a better writer. Reading aloud forces him to recognize different levels of his own writing that he’d never seen before.

Like my pal Judy Blume, he has a hard time listening to his own voice. (What’s wrong with these people?! They sound fabulous!) He can’t do different character voices when he reads, but he’s good at affecting different moods.

The session ended with John’s anecdote about a terrible party. Halfway through the festivities, he decided he didn’t want to be there anymore, so he snuck out and tip-toed to his car. It was 12 at night and he was facing a five-hour drive. Fortunately, he had Around the World in Eighty Days waiting for him. Phileas Fogg took him all the way home. John finished it in the driveway.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Conference Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.