Tag: reading

Becoming an Audiobook Reader

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Sarah Clinton-McCausland, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Open Education Librarian at the University of Maryland.

I never thought I’d lose my leisure reading habit. Leisure reading, pleasure reading, or “free voluntary reading” is “reading because you want to… [P]utting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead” (Krashen, 2004, p. x). Growing up, it was also my favorite activity in the world.

For people who like to read, reading is fun—more specifically, it is cognitively complex, immersive, energizing, embodied, and grounding. It’s a kind of play that takes place within a relatively safe container, balancing flow and emotional regulation, escape and connection, uncertainty and exploration. Allowed to read whatever I wanted throughout my childhood and adolescence, I checked out stacks of books from the public library and pulled intriguing, probably-age-inappropriate titles off my parents’ shelves. Each new book set me down in a world of unfamiliar people and occurrences, generating a hungry curiosity that propelled me forward. Reading allowed me to contextualize my own experiences and learn more about my likes and dislikes, deeply shaping my sense of self. I always preferred “visual reading”—print paper books, and later, the occasional eBook—but when it came to genre, I craved variety.

Then I started college—a time of personal growth and intellectual demand. I learned how to read and analyze theoretical texts purposively for a grade, but this process—combined with a newly expanded social life—gradually shifted me away from leisure reading. In the years after graduation, I would come home drained from my office jobs and crash in front of the Netflix subscription I could finally afford. I got through a handful of visual books per year, but the process had become a slog. No matter the book, my attention would drift, nagged by an endless to-do list of chores and obligations. Discouraged, I’d return books to the library half-finished. I had quietly lost my reading habit, but I didn’t fully understand why.

A few years later, midway through my MLIS, I sought answers through a class project. I conducted qualitative research with twelve Millennials who identified as lapsed avid leisure readers. Many of them had grown up in middle-class U.S. households and attended college, but all had developed more complicated relationships to their leisure time in adulthood, which impacted their media habits. Participants reported that “getting into” a book was the biggest barrier to regaining a habit, but it helped to choose reading material that was purely for fun. Others met their need for narrative story by listening to podcasts and audiobooks or reading more long-form articles on their phones, all of which slotted more easily into the shorter pockets of transitional, unstructured time available throughout the day.

Free voluntary reading can be a powerful expression of what bell hooks (1994) and Paulo Freire (1970) term “the practice of freedom.” Once we’ve learned how to read, we can engage in the serendipity that reading engenders for the rest of our lives, reminding ourselves over and over that we are malleable and can dream beyond our current contexts. But there are many dominant cultural forces in the U.S. which discourage exactly this kind of visionary play. We know the form this takes in 2026: literal book bans; the monetization of our attention; rising living costs; the demand that we continuously optimize our time and energy toward paid work and quantifiable self-improvement. And of course we also face the extraction of our labor and creativity via generative AI, while we’re simultaneously told that genAI will render that same labor and creativity obsolete. After college, my study participants and I were plunged more deeply into the demands of a semi-post-recession labor market, and things have only gotten weirder since then. Everyone I encounter is stressed and overscheduled at best. In times like these, reading can be an especially powerful balm—a ladder in our survival toolkits. But it can also be harder to read when so much is happening.

My study participants’ stories echoed my own, but while they made me feel less alone, they still weren’t enough to kickstart me back into reading. Paradoxically, because I’d started to consider reading something that was “good for me” and morally superior to other leisure activities, it had morphed into another means of optimization. I had a narrow vision of “ideal” leisure reading as a disciplined, meditative, phone-free hour with a print book each night before bed. So I felt ashamed when reality fell short of my expectations: Why can’t I read anymore?? How come all I do is watch TV? It’s so embarrassing that I’m a librarian who doesn’t read! It took me a long time to understand that my perfectionism around my reading practices erased both my hunger to read habitually and the potential benefits.

Unlike many of my study participants, though, I didn’t consider audiobooks a suitable alternative. The same white supremacist culture which prizes optimization tends to value written over oral language, and steeped in that culture, I’d come to believe that listening to audiobooks wasn’t quite “real” reading—and also that I just wasn’t an audiobook person. The deeper truth: I was scared I wasn’t actually capable of listening to audiobooks. My education and career have always rewarded my visual reading skills. Having both my sight and hearing (and a love for music and podcasts) made it easier to spend years ignoring how much I struggled to follow linear narratives in audio. My brain tends to slip around and chase other thoughts without printed text or images to ground it.

Still, it was obvious that audiobooks had the huge advantage of letting me do other things while reading. In theory, I could visually read much faster than I could listen to someone else reading, but I slowly came to acknowledge that it might be worth trying to read in my nonpreferred modality if the alternative was not really reading at all. Halfway through 2023, I checked out my first audiobook: a literary mystery-thriller by a favorite author I’d only read in print before. I raced through it in a few days and immediately borrowed another one.

I quickly confirmed that audiobooks’ affordances allowed them to fit into the interstitial, transitional times in my schedule, making chores more tolerable while letting me get into a book more easily. I started delving into books that had sat on my list for years, rediscovering the joy of reading only what I wanted to and abandoning anything that felt like just a “should.” I slowly became more comfortable with the affordances of audiobooks, and they’re now the first format I reach for when leisure reading. In other words, I think I’ve developed “audiobook literacy.”

I am still simply not as adept with aural media as visual, though, and probably never will be. In the past few years, I’ve gently observed my experiences, trying different strategies to accommodate and scaffold my audio reading needs. Now, for most books, I’ll try to obtain the print or eBook version at the same time so I can refer back to it periodically. (Sometimes a text-only book will convey additional layers of meaning through font and text formatting, making the book “sound” different when read visually. If I can’t get the print version of a given book, however, I have to just accept that it’s OK to get a different variation of the experience!) For literature with more characters or complex plots, I’ll also enhance my comprehension by taking notes and making family trees, timelines, or other diagrams by hand. (I love a sweeping multigenerational family saga—and a diagram!) I finally got through Wuthering Heights in audio this year by referring to the Project Gutenberg eBook and creating a chaotic but extremely helpful family tree based on the Wikipedia entry.

The more audiobooks I’ve read, the more I’ve finally embraced the reality that listening to audiobooks is reading. Recent research has started confirming what audiobookworms have known all along: a 2019 study, for instance, found that “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical” (Deniz et al., p. 7722). Our brains paint similar pictures regardless of modality.

That said, I still find that print and audio produce different reading experiences, and releasing my reading perfectionism has been a whole accommodation strategy in itself! I have a better time when I approach an audiobook knowing the experience won’t be exactly the same, and not expecting myself to “succeed” in audio the same way I can in print. I’ve developed more patience for my need to replay the same passages multiple times after spacing out, more tolerance for the vocal dissonance between my own internal narrator and the audiobook’s. I’ve learned I actually prefer some books in audio, especially thrillers, memoirs, and author-read titles. I enjoy giving my eyes a break and practicing my close listening skills. Sometimes I even remember audiobooks better than their visual counterparts, maybe because I have to work harder for them.

I’ve also learned that print and audio are fundamentally complementary. When I engage with a book in one format, I’m more likely to engage with the other—maybe even switching off depending on my mood. Learning to be curious and flexible about format—not just genre—has allowed me to take advantage of the affordances of audio, making reading a joyful and rewarding experience again.

Developing audiobook literacy has unexpectedly impacted my work as a subject liaison librarian in various ways, too. I’ve come to see leisure reading practices as a powerful way to develop transferable information literacy skills. They can teach us more about information contexts and affordances; show us new ways to navigate our own and others’ access needs; and help us reenvision inequitable systems. In reference and instruction interactions, I’ve started demonstrating how to access sources in different formats by default (e.g., “this database also lets you listen to journal articles in audio”), and I highlight library accessibility services in resource lists. My own experiences remind me that media format preferences are deeply individual, and disability status and access needs are complex and constantly shifting. I can’t ever assume where someone else locates themselves along those spectrums, especially because they may have very good reasons for not telling me or the institution.

I’ve also deepened my commitment to promoting play and leisure for their own sake. I suggest students pursue the projects that most spark their curiosity and interest, but I also encourage them to carve out leisure time outside of school and work whenever possible. As an icebreaker, I sometimes ask students to share any piece of leisure media they’ve enjoyed recently, emphasizing the validity of all formats. I’ll also disclose my own preferences and access challenges when appropriate. This can segue into conversations about accessibility, platformization, and the pros and cons of different formats in context—all applicable to scholarship, too.

My own information literacy skills (and institutional affiliation) also make it easier to access leisure reading materials. I usually get audiobooks and eBooks from my public library via Libby, but I occasionally buy them from Libro.fm or check LibriVox for public domain titles. I borrow print books from my workplace (including via interlibrary loan) or the public library, access public domain titles via Project Gutenberg, and sometimes purchase from Thriftbooks.com or Bookshop.org. I want to support students in developing a similar sense of information abundance and more pathways for meeting their leisure needs even after graduation, so in orientations, I talk about how public and academic libraries complement each other, and I explicitly promote our local public libraries as major sources for leisure reading and learning. Students aren’t always aware that they can get a public library card for free and access more “fun” books in print, audio, and eBook forms. In this current moment, it also feels good to help spawn more lifelong public library and local bookstore patrons!

Few things feel more essential right now than leisure and play, and activities like leisure reading can bring a deeper sense of meaningfulness to our lives in a way that job skills on their own don’t necessarily. By becoming an audiobook reader and developing a new literacy, I’ve been able to tap into this feeling more than I have in years, and I’m endlessly grateful that I was able to release my format perfectionism and regain one of my favorite things to do. I’m excited to keep exploring how to center play, leisure, and reading in my life and librarianship.

References

Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(39), 7722-7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Krashen, Stephen. 2004. The power of reading: Insights from the research. Libraries Unlimited.

Summer Break Book Recommendations: Critical Pedagogy, AI, and More

With summer break around the corner, I’m eagerly beginning to plan what books I might read this summer (maybe this is the year I’ll finally crack open Emily Wilson’s Iliad . . .). I’m also reflecting on the books I read this year as I prepared to teach my own course, an AI literacy elective, for the first time. Today, as we ease ourselves into summer break, I want to share four quickfire reviews of books I’ve recently read about pedagogy and AI. If you’re looking for something to read this summer, I hope you find something intriguing in this list!

I won’t bury the lede: Pedagogy of Freedom by Paulo Freire is the most impactful book I read this academic year. This book is a necessary antidote to how higher education is currently (de)valued, understood, and discussed, and it helped me refocus my teaching philosophy. Many people argue that politics should be removed from the classroom, but as Freire reminds us, education is inherently political because there can be no democracy without an educated population. While I do think post-graduation outcomes like salary and job placement can be part of how we evaluate a university, particularly when students take on so much debt to acquire a degree, it should not be the end of the conversation. Exemplary institutions, programs, and teachers do as Freire says: foster lifelong learning, develop critical thinking skills, and graduate students who are locally engaged and, yes, tuned in to the injustice around them with the desire, skills, and knowledge to make change. 

Next up: The Skillful Teacher by Stephen D. Brookfield (third edition), a recommendation from my wonderful colleague Angie. This is an engaging, down-to-earth guide to teaching, filled with practical tips and examples of assignments, instructor feedback, and rubrics. I found the chapters on critical thinking and classroom discussion particularly useful, and I plan to try several of the discussion activities in my course. I also appreciate how Brookfield grounds his philosophy about teaching college in the context of adult education studies, and I think he has a keen understanding of college students today. This edition was published in 2015, so some material about emerging technologies and teaching online may be outdated; however, it’s still a worthwhile read on the whole, particularly for those seeking concrete tips and examples. 

Finally, I read two books about AI (both recommendations from my wonderful colleague Aj). Mastering AI by Jeremy Kahn is an accessible, engaging introduction to AI issues across society, including education, medicine, politics, business, and more. At times, Kahn is more bullish on AI than I would be, but in general, I think he fairly represents and evaluates both AI-critical and AI-optimist viewpoints. This is a book I would share with my mom or another layperson who wants to understand what’s going on with AI but feels overwhelmed trying to follow the news. If an unlimited ebook license were available to us, I would assign excerpts from this book as readings in my course. 

Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is more scholarly than Mastering AI, but for a scholarly text, it falls on the more digestible side. Crawford focuses on making visible the invisibilized human and environmental harms of AI, like the electricity costs of data centers, the brutality behind mining rare earth elements, and the psychological trauma endured by content moderators in the Global South. She effectively punctures the idea of AI as something abstract, far away, “in the cloud,” grounding these tools in human blood and sweat. This is essential reading for those concerned about the planetary and human costs of AI.

Finally, some non-work-related book recommendations to wrap up this post 🙂 

  • I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasley
  • With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang 
  • Ararat by Louise Glück
  • Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 
  • Ghosts by Edith Wharton 

What have you been reading recently (library-related or not)? What do you plan to read this summer? Please share in the comments below!

All we’re doing is reading today.

Sometimes, the simplest instruction turns out to be the best. 

A few weeks ago, I taught two classes that turned out so well that I’m still riding that wave as I write this now. The professor and I’s entire class plan was to bring down carts of books related to the class topic, have the students pick something they were interested in, and then read for about an hour. This was the first class after spring break, to ease them back into their studies.  

I gave the barest minimum of library instruction at the beginning of class; I showed the students the library website, where I searched for books, and how to limit to the physical books we have in the library. I also took this opportunity to show them our new shelf map which attempts to simulate the serendipity of being up in the stacks. (Sidenote: our technology librarian, Chris, is a wizard for making tools like this.) Their professor then stepped in to explain what we were doing today, which was to find something that caught your eye and give it your (reading) attention for an hour. It was fine if they didn’t stick to the same book the entire time; they were encouraged to switch them out and read something else if they wanted to.  

The professor and I also read for an hour with the students. We couldn’t very well ask them to do something and say it was important without modelling it, right? I had the book Algospeak by Adam Aleksic, but their professor pulled multiple books and switched them out throughout the class. I played lo-fi video game music in the background. And you know what? It worked so well.  

None of the students in those two classes were on their phones or their laptops for a significant amount of time in that period. By the end of both classes, 7 students had voluntarily checked out 8 books. The one who checked out two had never checked out a book before in her college career. These were not necessarily related to class projects or papers, they just chose a book that captured their interest and read. We shared in groups and in a class setting.  

When their professor asked how the experience felt, they had some amazing takeaways that we can sometimes only dream of actually teaching and passing on: 

  • “Being friendly with yourself when reading dense things.”  
    • This student further talked about having to read passages multiple times (who hasn’t been there?) or looking up certain words they were unfamiliar with.  
  • “Looking up stuff referenced in the book revitalized my want to keep reading.”
    • This student had chosen a book from 2004. It referenced a country that would run out of water by 2015, and they were curious enough to go see what they’d done about the water crisis, since this country still exists.  
      • They were doing lateral reading without knowing it! 
    • They also talked about using the index – which, to be clear, I did not talk about at all.  

They also said that it was hard. Around the 15- or 20-minute mark, they said their attention started to waver, and I’ll be honest – mine does too. All of our attention spans have been decimated by the tiny computer in our pockets, and this deliberate class session to prioritize reading is trying to help remedy that.  

The professor I did these sessions with happens to be the chair of their department, so after the fact, they emailed all the other faculty about how well it went. This led to another day of reading class, this time for a First Year Seminar.  These students were definitely a little less focused than my 200- and 300-levels, but even so, some of them expressed how excited they were that class was going to be focused on reading. The professor and I did another debrief with students afterward, and at least two students from that class went on to check out the books they were reading.  

A week or so after, the chair of the department caught me to chat in the library to let me know that one of those students in that First Year Seminar actually changed her major to Environmental Studies largely based on the book she got to check out in that class. That’s the kind of thing a librarian fantasizes about! Talk about getting books into their readers’ hands.  

Clearly, it was worth it for us to take a step back and let curiosity guide some structured reading time. I know it’s hard to carve out time like that when everything feels like it needs to hurtle forward, especially with classes that have to cover so much content in a semester. It did take a lot of time on my part to both create the book lists for the classes and go up and pull them myself, though if I were really strapped for time, I could have passed that off to a student worker. (I just like getting my hands on real books whenever I get the chance.)

If it’s at all possible, though, I think the benefits speak for themselves. Books were checked out, students were reading, and it led to more library sessions and other initiatives. For instance, for finals season, we are hosting a “silent reading club” every Wednesday from 2-4pm until the semester ends in mid-May.  I am excited to see this continue into other disciplines next fall semester, since all the other liaison librarians were just as jazzed as I was about the success of these sessions.

Let me know if you try it and how it works for you!

Fitting In Reading

It seems like every year one of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more. Read more? But I’m a librarian, I read all the time, right?

Over the 7 years that I’ve been a librarian I’ve heard that misconception all too often upon meeting new people. “Oh, you’re a librarian? You must read all the time/love to read/spend your days reading!” Of course the context of that statement ultimately determines my response (and I am always polite, even when slightly exasperated), but in truth the answers are no, yes, no. Of course I love to read, as I always have, even before I was a librarian. But the amount of long-form, focused reading that I typically do during my workday is very, very small. Not that other forms of reading don’t matter — I can usually keep up with my work-related RSS feed and the newspaper, and like most office workers I read many many MANY emails each day. But sit down in my office with a book? Not often.

While I’ve found blogs and other online sources to be useful in keeping up with the academic librarianship and higher education more generally, lots of scholarly research and practical information is published in books and journal articles, too. Reading a book about information literacy, or the latest issue of C&RL, or a book about student retention that specifically addresses commuter colleges is totally, 100% relevant to my job as Coordinator of Library Instruction at a non-residential college.

So why is there a stack of books and articles 8 inches high on my desk? And a book due back to ILL tomorrow that I haven’t even cracked open?

Reading, and especially reading in print, is tricky in an office environment. To me it has the appearance of being simultaneously uninterruptible and leisure-like, which I realize are somewhat at odds. The focus that someone reading a long-form text brings to the task, perhaps taking notes as they read, sometimes makes it seem almost rude to bother them. But that’s contrasted with the popular image of a professor with their feet up on their desk, surrounded by books, just waiting for students to stop in with questions. I’ve exaggerated both of these scenes, but I think there’s a grain of truth in each.

If I’m reading at work, will folks not stop in because I seem focused and they don’t want to interrupt me? Or, on the flip side, if folks do stop in will I lose track of the thread of the reading? And, perhaps the core of the issue, is reading “work” in the same way that other office-bound tasks we may do at our jobs are “work”? Or does reading at my desk make it seem like I’m not working, especially if there are other tasks that need doing on my to-do list? Alternatively, I could bring work-related reading home to tackle on evenings and weekends, but then I’m shortchanging my opportunities for leisure reading (which I never feel I have enough of anyway).

Keeping up with the scholarly and practical literature in my field is professional development, and as such it’s an important and worthwhile undertaking. So maybe it’s as simple as that — reading for professional development is a work-related task like any other, and I should add it to my to-do list for each day.

Do you read books and articles while at work? How do you find the time and space to keep up with longer form professional reading?

“We Don’t Read That Way”

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Laura Braunstein, English Language and Literature Librarian at Dartmouth College.

I was chatting recently with a professor in my liaison department who was beginning research for a new book. Did she have everything she needed? Was there anything I should look into ordering? Yes, she said, the library was pretty well stocked with books and journals for the topic. However, many of the books she needed we only had as ebooks – for those, she would order print copies through interlibrary loan.

One of my colleagues had a similar experience. He was talking to several of his liaison faculty about a new ebook collection in the Humanities. The collection would be great, they told him, when they needed to look something up quickly, or search for a mention of a particular topic. But they would still want print books for serious study – ebooks weren’t the same, they told him, “we just don’t read that way.”

Many of these professors own Kindles or other ereaders, and love them – for reading the latest Ruth Rendell mystery on a six-hour flight to France to visit an archive. It’s one thing, they tell us, to read for pleasure on a screen – but it’s quite another to read for understanding, for critique, for engaging in the scholarly conversation. And this isn’t a generational matter – some of the faculty I know who seem most committed to print are younger than forty.

Does reading in the Humanities necessitate the long-form, linear, analog experience of the codex? Even when I tell these professors about the features available in some of the new ebook platforms – highlighting, annotation, sharing notes, etc – they still assert that they “just don’t read that way.” (And what applies to reading is even more crucial in writing – when it comes to tenure or promotion, they tell me, no monograph “born digital” would ever “count” in the way a print book would.)

Ebooks seem like sweet low-hanging fruit – they have enhanced searchability, accessibility at any time or place, and reduced storage and preservation costs. What’s not to love? Ebooks seem to make our students very happy. Often they don’t want to read a book cover to cover (although their professors might wish they would), and searching for relevant passages seems to satisfy their needs for many assignments. And journal literature seems exempt from the preference for print – I haven’t heard many complaints about deaccessioning back runs of print journals represented in JSTOR’s collections, for instance.

Is a user who routinely requests a print copy when the ebook is in the library’s holdings just multiplying the costs we thought we were saving? Should we deny these requests? Should we tell our Humanities faculty that even if they “just don’t read that way,” they should, because that’s the way the world of scholarly communication is moving in most other fields? Do we need to change their habits of reading, and habits of mind? Do we lead them to new formats or follow their preferences?