I’m not alone in my enjoyment of audio books! Here’s Steven King’s take on them from an October Entertainment Weekly.

Some critics — the always tiresome Harold Bloom among them — claim that listening to audiobooks isn’t reading. I couldn’t disagree more. In some ways, audio perfects reading. One friend of mine likes to tell the story of how she got so involved in Blair Brown’s reading of Sue Miller’s Lost in the Forest that she missed her turnpike exit and ended up in Boston. Another swears he never really ”got” Elmore Leonard until he listened to Arliss Howard reading The Hot Kid and heard the mixed rhythm of the dialogue and narration.

The book purists argue for the sanctity of the page and the perfect communion of reader and writer, with no intermediary. They say that if there’s something you don’t understand in a book, you can always go back and read it again (these seem to be people so technologically challenged they’ve never heard of rewind, or can’t find the back button on their CD players). Bloom has said that ”Deep reading really demands the inner ear…that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” Here is a man who has clearly never listened to a campfire story.

He even includes his top ten.

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Hi.

My name is Mike J.

And I’m a fan of audio books.

Now, some people don’t take audio books seriously. True, it isn’t reading, it’s listening. But isn’t that a kind of throwback to pre-literate days of childhood, of being read to by an adult? Or even further back, of an oral tradition that, in the West at least, goes back to Homer?

Of course, if you’ve read my audio books reviews in the Times Union (which should be available here), you’ll know that I’m not listening to classics, but a mix of contemporary fiction and nonfiction. As someone who pretty much reads words all day for a living (as a slot editor and book reviewer) and who has about a 30-minute commute each way, audio books are a good driving distraction, and a way to zone out while I’m at the gym.

Most of the books I’ve listened to have come from the library. For years, it has been my chief enabler. It’s made me a big fan of Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly.

This past year, one of the more delightful surprises was Joshilyn Jackson’s “Between Georgia.”

One I’m looking forward to is the New York State Theatre Institute’s “Sherlock’s Legacy.”

Are there are audio-bibliophiles out there? What are some of your favorites? Next week, I’ll post what I think was the best audio book I listened to this year.