For much of history, reading was a fairly noisy activity. On clay tablets written in ancient Iraq and Syria some 4,000 years ago, the commonly used words for “to read” literally meant "to cry out" or "to listen". Only occasionally, a different technique was mentioned: to "see" a tablet – to read it silently.
Today, silent reading is the norm. Most adults retreat into a personal, quiet world inside their heads when they are reading, but we may be missing out on some vital benefits when we do this. The majority of us bottle the words in our heads as if sitting in the hushed confines of a library.
And yet, there’s something about the comfort of hearing a human voice, especially if that voice is a pleasing one. I am old enough to remember the renditions in a resonant baritone voice of "The Man from Snowy River" and "Clancy of the Overflow" by Leonard Teale (not to be mistaken with Colin Thiele whom I equally admire for his novel "Storm Boy"; incidentally, Leonard Teale's birth surname was also Thiele but he adopted the Teale homophone when he acted in "Homicide"; remember "Homicide"?)
But back to reading aloud, and my growing collection of audiobooks which I usually buy on CDs and then copy onto a more convenient USB (which stands for "Universal Serial Bus", in case you want to know) flash drive, or copy directly onto a USB stick from the huge audio library at archive.org (if you find archive.org usful, make a donation here for doing a great job).
I've "ebay-ed" Bill Bryson's "At Home", "The World as Stage", and "A Short History of Nearly Everything", and Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". Many happy hours of listening await me.
