Carpentaria Audiobook
Eliecer Brathwaite
Linda Daley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Audiobook downloads (up 15% on the previous year) were part of a pandemic boost for publisher revenues. Some are read by the authors themselves or by famous actors including Elizabeth Moss and Tom Hanks.
When reading, we engage a bundle of brain skills that have evolved over centuries if not millennia. A recent study used fMRI scans to show people generate word meaning in the same way whether they see it or hear it.
Though reading is still usually thought of as a stationary, silent and solo practice, there is a long tradition of reading communally and aloud. This is not only reading by adults to children, but also among adults.
Streamed audiobooks available through smartphones enable reading-as-listening while mobile. The kinetic dimension of reading-as-listening while moving through space, commuting, walking or while driving is yet to be fully understood.
In Australia, streamed audiobook listening might offer a 21st century way of celebrating the affective, imaginative and kinetic dimensions of the Indigenous songlines that criss-cross the continent, either by remediating print books or bypassing the written form altogether.
Audiobooks could also be used more in higher education. Princeton University Press recently announced the release of their PUB audio series, signalling new educational formats for scholars and students.
Public Libraries are a partnership between Local Government and the Queensland Government through the State Library of Queensland. Our little libraries are apart of Rural Libraries Queensland, which gives you access to over 300 000 books available through our catalogue. Being part of 27 other shires gives our library access to so much more. Once you are a member there is free talking books and e-books, search your family tree, trove and many many more.
The Normanton and Karumba Library is not just about books anymore! We hold large selection of adult, young-adult and junior fiction and non-fiction, junior read-a-long kits, audiobooks on MP3 and CD, baby board books, book club sets, DVDs, magazines, newspapers and local history information.
First 5 forever is offered weekly for 0-5 year old's at the Karumba Library each wednesday from 10am to 11am and the Normanton Library each every second saturday from 10.00am to 11.30am (please refere to schedule below for dates).
Come into the Normanton Visitor Information Centre in the historic Burns Philp Building, located on the corner of Landsborough & Caroline Streets, where you can enjoy a cool drink and talk to the friendly staff. You might like to purchase a small souvenir and browse Normanton's attractions and history. The Visitor Information Centre houses the Heritage Centre as well and has displays featuring flood photos of Normanton, pioneers and explorers, wildlife displays and historical artefacts.
The Les Wilson Barramundi Discovery Centre is located at Yappar Street Karumba. We have a merchandise shop, cafe, local brochures, and information that covers Townsville to Cooktown, Townsville to Mt Isa, the lovely Atherton Tablelands and along the Savannah way to Karumba and Karumba to Winton.
Want to read these books (and hundreds of thousands of others) without breaking the bank? Check out Overdrive.com, which offers ebooks and audiobooks for free, through local and regional public libraries around the country!
I tend to stick to a few genres when I read fiction. Mysteries, historical fiction, and sports tend to be the top of the list. My nonfiction reading might be politics, history, or Appalachian studies.
Another rural book that I love is Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright, an indigenous writer from Queensland, Australia. My friends at Feral Arts in Queensland gave me the book on tape. It changed my horizons. This novel has sturdy plotlines of nefarious wheeler dealers shoving around hard-working blokes, struggling remote communities, and miners, fishermen, healers. But Ms. Wright also shares characters who talk to frogs, depend on ghosts, and negotiate the Bay of Carpentaria with stories, music, and old knowledge. This is a deep and worthy story. Great power. Great fun.
The skills of reading and writing, which many of us take for granted as necessarily paired, were not always so, according to medievalists. When Margery Kempe determined that she would author her life through the production of a book, it was an extraordinary intention for social and religious reasons. Practically, however, it may not have seemed so extraordinary at a time when authorship had not yet essentially been tied to the ability to write.
Pre-modern aural reading practices help us to rethink the role of technologised aural reading that streamed audiobooks potentially enable in our own era. Martyn Lyons points out that audiobooks are not a modern invention, since literature was being shared orally long before recording and streaming existed.
When and why do we turn away from the codex to the audiobook, or combine it with the audiobook? As constant readers, we find it difficult to separate our professional from our recreational reading as they are almost always interrelated. Here, we reflect on our own experiences with audiobook titles that may not necessarily make it onto our course reading lists. The listening experience, nonetheless, enables us to consider our reading assumptions and habits more broadly for pedagogic possibilities.
I was ambushed by a rush of emotion when Bon looks through the windows of his former house and makes out the shape of his sleeping daughter and imagines his baby son stretched across the parental bed he has deserted:
AI-voiced audiobooks (such as BookBaby) are already making inroads into the market. Audible has long held an anti-synthetic-narration policy, but has been called out by narrators and others who discovered and flagged several AI-narrated titles listed on its site which were subsequently taken down. AI is obviously a cheaper alternative to live narration, yet without the interpretation work done by human narrators, listeners are likely to have more difficulty with making sense of the text.
Audiobooks enable us to expand our habits of textual sense-making through sonic, and particularly vocal, perception beyond a narrowly visual field. Considering the transformations in the humanities that have escalated since the pandemic forced rapid shifts in our communicative practices, why should we not include the incorporation of audiobooks as one of the shifts in the tertiary literary studies classroom? With its multiple scenes of listening to the telling of stories small and large, a novel like Carpentaria invites an expanded pedagogical field where audiobooks facilitate the encounter with a text and its vocal rhythms.
The social reading of audiobooks is booming, along with app subscriptions. The Goodreads social reading platform, also owned by Amazon, allows contributors to give star ratings and add reviews of audiobooks and has compiled a list of Best Audiobooks Ever with almost 2000 entries. Although few distinctions are made between audiobooks, ebooks and print books on these platforms, the quality of narration is inevitably spotlit in reviews of audiobooks.
As educators, we can see the immense opportunities for technology-supported social reading offered by the audiobook. Imagine how differently our courses could enact the encounter between orality and textuality that audiobooks enable if it were possible for university libraries to have a licence for titles that are commercially available? Programs like Perusall enable close readings and responses to audio segments and podcasts, yet we are hampered by the lack of legal access to full audio texts. We work around this technological/legal restriction by selecting passages that we read aloud in class. When we listen to the novel, we share it together, almost as they did in the Middle Ages.
Linda DaleyBrigid Magneron audiobooks The Expanded Writers Collectiveon the trails of grief. Romy AshRose Michaelon talking writing Stayci TaylorOliver ShawFrancesca Rendle-ShortPeta MurrayKim MunroBrigid MagnerAmes HawkinsMelody Ellison the ecstasy of 'togetherness itself' Jack MadinEd Serviceon unleashing collective experience Linda DaleyBrigid Magneron audiobooks The Expanded Writers Collectiveon the trails of grief. Romy AshRose Michaelon talking writing Stayci TaylorOliver ShawFrancesca Rendle-ShortPeta MurrayKim MunroBrigid MagnerAmes HawkinsMelody Ellison the ecstasy of 'togetherness itself' Jack MadinEd Serviceon unleashing collective experience
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which we work, the Burramattagal people of the Darug nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded, and the struggles for justice are ongoing. We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands this digital platform reaches.
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