How audiobooks are reviving the rhythm of storytelling
- Dominika Fleszar
- May 29
- 4 min read
Updated: May 31
What if reading was never meant to be silent?
Finding a quiet corner and getting lost in the pages of your favourite novel for hours together, is a common understanding of the art of reading. We tend to think of reading as a silent, solitary act––a luxury of sorts, a sign of a good upbringing that gives us the time to sit down with a book and truly consume it.
Is it, though?
Cultural shifts: from oral traditions to the silent reader
If you Google "is listening to audiobooks lazy?", you'll find out that countless other people ask themselves the same question. Human history suggests reading as speaking. Most scholars even believe that in ancient Greece and Rome, reading aloud was the norm. Manuscripts were often written in scriptio continua, a continuous stream of text without punctuation or spacing. Decoding meaning from such dense prose required vocalisation. You sounded the text out, tasting its rhythms and cadences.
Even solitary readers read out loud. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, recounts his amazement at seeing Ambrose, his mentor, reading silently. The moment was so strange, so contrary to expectation: "(w)hatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one", he says.
Some theorists, like psychologist Julian Jaynes, have gone further, suggesting that the dominance of inner, silent thought is itself a relatively recent development. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes argued that ancient humans may not have experienced consciousness as we do today. Instead, they “heard” commands from one hemisphere of the brain, often interpreted as the voices of gods. In that sense, the idea of being guided by external voices—whether divine or narrative—has deep evolutionary and psychological roots.
The commercialisation of the written word
It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance that silent reading began to overtake the spoken kind. The invention of the printing press, the standardisation of texts, and growing literacy made reading quieter, more private, more internal. By the 19th century, reading silently to oneself had become the literary gold standard, especially with the emergence of the 'novel' as the dominant literary form.
Paperbacks have been a dominant medium for reading for decades. Today, however, the audiobooks are beginning to take over. From kindles to phablets, readers have become more tech-savvy and how!
In an age of digitalisation–where climate change persists and deforestation plays 'infrastructural protocol'––enters the audiobook, gently taking some pressure off the environment.
The intensity of aural narratives
Often derided as a lazy substitute for “real reading,” audiobooks have quietly (or not so quietly) reclaimed a space that was once entirely vocal. I’ve been thinking about this as I near the end of a 28-hour audiobook of The Terror by Dan Simmons. It's a long, sprawling, bone-chilling novel—but it's Tom Sellwood’s narration that makes it truly unforgettable. His rendering of the various voices, regional accents, and restrained desperation brings the story unnervingly close. The claustrophobia of the ship, the slow unravelling of the men, the encroaching horror, all feel more human when heard aloud.
As I talk to more people, I realise that this feeling is mutual. A significant number of people prefer audio narrations over silent reading. "I enjoy watching horror movies and wish to retrieve the same thrill through the written word. But, what I've realised is– stories that contain elements of thrill, mystery, excitement, and horror are better when heard than read," says Shama Nimkar, an avid audiobook consumer of horror.
Diving into the psychology of voice
This may sound speculative (and it is), but the popularity of audiobooks could reflect something deep within us, rather than just unwillingness to focus in silence: a comfort in surrendering to a voice, in hearing rather than internally generating language. When we listen to stories, especially when they’re emotionally rich and vocally expressive, we may be tapping into a much older mode of awareness—one where voice was authority, and the self was partly constructed by what was spoken to us.
There’s a real intimacy in being read to.
History's storyteller
There’s another layer to this return to voice—one that’s often overlooked. Long before literature was printed, and even before formal theatre emerged, storytelling was an oral tradition often carried by women. In many early societies in which the rates of literacy were incredibly low, the storyteller––frequently a matriarchal figure who held a near-sacred role. She was the keeper of memory, the transmitter of wisdom, the emotional interpreter of her community’s myths and lived truths. These stories weren’t simply told; they were performed, shaped by voice, gesture, and mood.
These oral traditions were not only communal. They were gendered, often anchored in women’s voices and rhythms, even as patriarchal structures later co-opted them into male-dominated institutions like classical theatre and academia.
In that sense, audiobooks are doing more than just reviving an old form—they’re reclaiming it. They validate the power of voice as a carrier of meaning and feeling. And in a world where assertiveness and confidence are still judged differently depending on who’s speaking, returning to vocal storytelling carries a quiet feminist resonance too.
Far from being a threat to the written word, audiobooks may be helping us remember what reading used to be—and why we ever fell in love with it in the first place.
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