I have listened to a shocking number of audiobooks. Usually while doing things that would traditionally be considered totally incompatible with literature. Walking the dog. Doing the washing up. Standing in a kitchen at 10pm, eating out of the pan. Sitting on a train after work, too tired to look at my phone but not tired enough to sit in silence with my own thoughts.

None of these are the kind of environments in which one is supposed to be ‘reading’. There is still, unfortunately, a fairly fixed image of what reading looks like: someone calm and quiet, unnaturally still, holding a hardback, perhaps a steaming cup of tea to one side, ideally with the time and energy to focus on it properly.

I didn’t grow up around people who sat and read for hours at a time, and neither did most of the people I know. For most of us, evenings were for telly, for getting things done, for being tired in a way that didn’t really lend itself to concentration. Reading was a nice idea, but not always a realistic one. What I did have, however, was an incredibly patient mother with a well-stocked bandoleer of ‘voices’ who used to let us climb up onto her big, comfy bed and listen to her reading chapters of fantastic novels in that sleepy-warm, 45-minutes, right after a bath and just before bed.

Listening to stories like that was our way of fitting ‘reading’ into our lives. It was easier as a kid with only school to fill my days; I could read my Hunger Games or Percy Jackson before dinner or at lunchtime. But it only got harder as the years went by to fit books around my life and then, at some point, like a lot of people, I just stopped. Suddenly, I had 10-hour shifts and huge commutes at each end. I was leaving the house at six in the morning and getting home between eight-thirty and nine at night. My love of reading was replaced by takeaways and telly until I fell asleep.

So, when people get a bit funny about audiobooks not being ‘real reading’, I always wonder who, exactly, they think has the time to perform reading in the approved way, and more importantly, who they’re imagining when they picture it. To sit still, uninterrupted, fully focused, for long stretches of time, without needing to work, or cook something, or answer someone, or just lie down because the day has knocked the life out of you.

An audiobook lets you take a story with you into the parts of your day that aren’t otherwise compatible. It doesn’t require the same ability to carve out time that isn’t already spoken for. It meets you where you are, which, for a lot of people, is not sitting alone by a window with a book.

Which is strange, isn’t it? For a long time, reading wasn’t something people did alone and in silence. It was something you listened to together. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it wasn’t unusual for one person to read aloud while others worked, in kitchens, in workshops, in shared rooms at the end of the day. There were even cheap public ‘penny readings’, where people gathered to listen to stories and speeches for the price of a coin. Long before mass literacy and cheap paperbacks made private reading more common, working people were already engaging with books through voice, through performance, through listening. In that sense, audiobooks aren’t a new or lesser version of reading; they’re a continuation of something much older than that.

And performance matters. A good narrator doesn’t just read the book, they interpret it. They give shape to pauses, humour, anger and exhaustion. They can make a character feel softer or sharper than they did on the page. It’s why, even now that I have more time for physical reading again, if I love a book, I will often go back and listen to it as well. It feels like reading it for the first time all over again.

And if the point of reading is to encounter a story, to sit inside someone else’s language and life for a while, then it seems strange to insist that there is only one correct way of doing that. Because the truth is, for a lot of people, it’s not about doing it right. It’s about doing it at all. About whether reading fits into our lives, or whether it gets quietly edged out by easy telly, and takeaways, and everything else that demands your time and energy.

Audiobooks will never replace reading entirely, but they expand where it can happen, who it can reach, and what it can look like. And that feels less like compromise, and more like the opening of a door.

This piece was commissioned to mark the beginning of the Bee's partnership with Audible, who have been generous supporters of New Writing North's programmes for working-class writers since they began in earnest in 2020.

Audible have kindly agreed to fund new commissions – fiction and non-fiction – for working-class writers over the next year, which means we can find and nurture new writers, and publish work by people at different stages of their writing careers. That means more people will have their work read, and more readers will get to read writing that shares working-class stories and experiences.

We are pleased and proud to work with an organisation that understands the tradition of listening to people reading stories, and that sees to expand representation in the writing and publishing industries.

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