There’s more to books than reading, so listen up

I am a member of Johannesburg’s coolest book group (we think it is, anyway). When I joined I was told this was not a book club, as that has all the wrong connotations — but, to be fair, the core elements are the same: firm friendship, enriching discussion, good food, plentiful wine.

At our first postlockdown gathering, one of our gang felt compelled to make an admission that she feared might see her ousted. She had stopped reading books, she said, and she now only listened to them.

She needn’t have worried. While the pros and cons of audiobooks make for an interesting conversation about the phenomenology of reading vs listening, busy bibliophiles cannot afford to turn their noses up at Audible and co. Audiobooks simply mean that more books can make their way into your life through limited windows of opportunity: while driving, while exercising, while washing the dishes.   

As a teacher in a university English department, I spend my days in and around books — and manuscripts, articles, essays, printed or electronic texts of various kinds, but that is reading for work. Reading for pleasure? Not so much. With just a little hyperbole, I could make an even more shocking confession than my book group companion. It seems to me that I hardly even listen to books, never mind read them; instead, hungry for literature but starved for time, I end up listening to podcasts about books and recordings of virtual book launches.

Sometimes I can fool myself that this is an acceptable substitute for the real thing. This week, for instance, I listened to two episodes of the WISER Podcast (produced by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in which Shireen Hassim and Sisonke Msimang read short texts they’d written on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. You couldn’t ask for more direct access to authorial expertise. Hassim’s books include histories of the ANC Women’s League and other women’s political organisations, and she has published widely on Mam’ Winnie. Msimang is the author of the 2018 book The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela.

I should have read the body of work produced by these two brilliant writer-scholars on their shared subject months ago. Readers with long memories might recall that I have ventured and retracted a handful of claims about Madikizela-Mandela in this publication over the years. I acknowledge that it is better to withhold unearned opinions; in this case, I have concluded that I should shut up indefinitely about the topic until I have read and listened a lot more.

There again, the question nags: is to listen the same as to read? Msimang’s lyrical but incisive prose, Hassim’s eloquent academic framing of the different approaches that might be taken in assessing such a contested historical figure — the written word read in the authors’ own voices for the podcast — all this seemed about as rich an experience as could be crammed into half an hour. And yet I also know that it was a mere skimming of the surface, a dipping of the toe into water that runs deep. If I really want to do the work of learning (or unlearning) about Winnie Mandela, many hours of the leisurely labour of reading and rereading are required.

I also had the hurried privilege of tuning in to hear two veteran SA journalists, Jacques Pauw and Anton Harber, discussing Harber’s new book So, For The Record at its virtual launch hosted by Jennifer Malec of The Reading List. This conversation compressed into 63 minutes a remarkable amount of information — and some astonishing revelations — about the role of our country’s news media in facilitating and resisting state capture.  

I finished this hour’s listening (completed in fragments while making dinner and hanging up the washing) confident that I knew all there is to know about the Sunday Times, Sars, amaBhungane, Daily Maverick, the Gupta Leaks and more ... yet now, as I hold a copy of Harber’s book in my hands, about 350 pages lying ahead of me, I am reminded that I know very little at all. An admission of ignorance is a good starting point. I turn to the first page with the thrill of the unknown and unread.