In a recent episode of his “Bookworm” podcast, Mike Schmitz said,
If you are listening to a book, you have not read the book.
He doubled down in a newsletter titled “Time to Hit the Cognitive Gym” (which, amusingly and ironically, offers an audio version):
For example, I’ve long said that “reading” audiobooks is not actually reading. The audio keeps advancing without you having to wrestle with the message.
Mike is wrong.
Let me start with two powerful counterexamples that require us to weaken that claim, and then we’ll get more nuanced.
Counterexample 1: Reading Shakespeare’s Plays
Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed, not read. However, almost all US students first encounter his plays as printed books. This format allows easier asynchronous classroom study, but it is obvious that if you are reading the play, you have not seen the play.
So in this trivial case, reading is not the best way to experience the work or “wrestle with the message.” Listening to the play being read would be better; listening to it being performed would be better still; watching a recorded performance another step up; and attending a live production the best possible format.
Counterexample 2: Rich Audio
My wife and I recently finished listening to The Situation Room by George Stephanopoulos. It’s a fascinating history of the situation room, the communication hub of the White House, which I always picture as the set from The West Wing—but apparently has almost nothing in common with that set.
We grabbed the audio version because we like listening on long car rides. We were surprised and delighted to learn that, while most of the audio is just Stephanopoulos reading his own book, the editor inserted actual interview audio instead of just reading the transcripts. The result is a much richer, more nuanced, and in many cases more emotional experience than reading the book could possibly have been.
So in this less-trivial case (an actual book, published as a book, not a play published centuries later as a book), reading is once again not the best way to experience the work or “wrestle with the message.”
Given the emotional content of some of the events the author recounts (the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and others), simply reading the printed page does not permit the reader to engage emotionally as well as the audio book does.
An Argument I’m Not Making
I’m not particularly interested in whether listening to a book “counts” as reading it, and that’s not the argument Schmitz makes either—he happily said on the same podcast that for a “gap” book (his and his cohosts' term for what they’re reading between books they read for the podcast), audiobooks work just fine.
The question is whether you need to read a book with your eyes to get everything out of it. Schmitz says yes, and I say that his claim is simplistic at best and often wrong.
Entire Genres Where Listening Is Critical
Most poems are probably better listened to than read (e.e.cummings being an easy counterexample; I can’t even begin to guess how you’d read aloud, for example, “Here’s a Little Mouse").
Songs, after all, are poems, and reading a song is at least as inadequate as reading a play—probably more so. Any genre or work, I would venture to expand, where assonance, consonance, rhythm, meter, or rhyme matters—would all be lessened by reading.
This category of works almost certainly includes stories from the oral tradition, where they are meant to be heard read or sung, not just looked at with the eyes.
Sure, sustained literary analysis of certain kinds requires reading, but “wrestling with the message” of a song or poem or oral saga absolutely requires listening. It would be ahistorical and insulting to claim that listeners to oral traditions like the Torah were not wrestling with the message.
The Strongest Version of the Argument
Given the counterexamples, let’s rephrase what Schmitz said to the strongest remaining version of the argument:
Reading is necessary to fully engage with or wrestle with the message of some works, but there are some works for which reading is insufficient, unnecessary, or both.
Now, Schmitz specifically said “books,” and I’ve expanded it to “works,” which may be unkind. He admittedly doesn’t really read fiction, and I would guess that extends to poetry; but as I showed with The Situation Room audiobook, he can’t be right about even all nonfiction books.
What I Would Have Said Instead
This post is too long already, so allow me to state the best version of this claim, which I think captures some of Schmitz’s intent while fixing his most egregious error:
Fully engaging with a work requires experiencing it in the format its author intended.
This version of the claim resolves Shakespeare’s plays as well as all or most songs, poetry, and oral traditions. It also allows us to affirm what Schmitz said for a specific set of works: the narrow subcategory of books whose authors wrote them specifically to be consumed as written works and not in any other medium. (Such a claim is strongest for academic texts, where the footnotes and endnotes are critical, or for certain authors like Edward Tufte where the visual presentation of the material is as much a part of the work as the words themselves; an audiobook of a journal article or one of Tufte’s works would just be silly, and nobody would argue that a listener to such a thing could engage much at all, much less fully, with the work.)
The only works I can think of that don’t fit this claim are those where the author would have preferred a different medium but was constrained: a book that should have been a rich audio experience like The Situation Room, but whose author lived before such a thing was possible or didn’t have the resources to create it; a poem that should have been performed, but whose author had to resort to weird punctuation to suggest tones or pauses because ubiquitous recording wasn’t possible.
Where Do We Go From Here?
“Reading” and “listening” (and “attending”) aren’t moral categories; they’re lenses onto a work. Some lenses reveal structure—citations, diagrams, exquisitely reasoned argument. Others reveal color—tone, emphasis, the crack in a witness’s voice. The important part isn’t eyeballs but attention.
Some practical rules of thumb:
- Honor the native medium. Plays, poetry, songs, interviews, oral histories? Listen. Textbooks, arguments, figure-heavy work? Read.
- Match your intent. The author’s intent matters, but so does yours. Studying to quote or to argue? Read, annotate, and expand on it. Seeking to feel the shape of a story or the weight of an event? Listen and sit with it.
- Mix and match. For consequential works (to you or to the world), do both. Listen holistically for context and emotion, then read deeply for precision. Or vice-versa: dig in with your eyes until you’re satiated, then sit back and let your ears give you a different perspective entirely.
Schmitz’s mistake isn’t valuing reading; it’s universalizing and absolutizing it. The right claim is far smaller but far truer: to fully engage a work, use the medium that best carries its meaning.
Or, more simply, if it was made to sing, let it sing.
