At the same time that I picked up the now-carried-everywhere Shuffle, I also picked up Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

Or, more accurately, I downloaded it, as an audio book from the iTunes store. It was my first audio book purchase, and buying it felt like I was cheating. Like I had eschewed a classic novel for its Reader’s Digest summary. Technically, my download of Freakonomics was unabridged. But without its crinkling pages in hand, without its black words racing past my saccadic glances, it still felt, well, less than the actual book.

Worse, it still felt less than actually reading. As if, by taking in the Steves’ work through my ears rather than my eyeballs, I was missing the most important part, was divorcing myself from the long, grand history of letters, was undermining my aspirations to the snotty literati crowd.

It turns out, however, that there’s historical precedent for such aural affairs: until the twelfth century, nearly all reading was done alound. Saint Augustine, for example was shocked to discover that when Ambrose, bishop of Milan, read, “his eyes followed the pages and his heart pondered the meaning, though his voice and tongue were still.” Even reading privately involved quietly speaking the words aloud, leading Ivan Illich to describe the monasteries of his time as ‘communities of mumblers’.

Indeed, at that time, reading was an inherently social activity, not the solitary one that it’s since become. As David Levy describes in his excellent Scrolling Forward: “for many centuries… if you read aloud, you were likely to be reading to others. And those listening were themselves considered to reading – not because they were looking at the text, but because they were hearing it.”

Or, in the words of Ivan Illich again, “all those who, with the reader, are immersed in this hearing milieu are equals before the sound.”

Equals before the sound! I like that. And, it turns out, I like audio books as well. I can read them walking down the street or jostling through subway cars, can play them by stereo while mopping the kitchen floor, and can stuff them, in bits and pieces, into the small gaps throughout my day.

This past weekend, I picked up Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything – which, unabridged, belies its name with a seventeen hour playing time. After that, I have an Audible.com wishlist slowing filling up with any number of auditized volumes I’d love to listen through. I’m immersing myself into Illich’s hearing milieu, and I’m going in deep.