The benefits of listening to an audiobook while reading along

Until recently I believed that the three greatest contributions audiobooks have made to civilization were providing access to books to the sight-impaired, reducing the tedium of mindless drudgery and providing another level of interpretation and richness through the voices of gifted narrators.

Further, audiobooks can add a new dimension to reading. Many people listen to a book while reading it at the same time, a practice known as “immersion reading.” The term began to take off in the late 1990s, rising steeply in the new century, which was, as it happens, when audiobooks began their own momentous ascent.

Perhaps the most important group of listener-readers are those with dyslexia, a neurobiologically based learning disability that makes it difficult to link written words to their sounds. While the condition makes reading a laborious, frustrating business, it has nothing to do with intelligence. Listening and seeing a word at the same time helps to unlock the code — which is, after all, what writing is. The same practice also apparently helps people with attention-deficit disorder stay focused.

Listening to a book while reading has proved valuable in improving reading skills. Vox Books publishes a huge selection of books with built-in audio for children of various ages and reading levels. Beyond that, it has an extensive line of bilingual books with built-in audio for young readers. The languages include Spanish, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Tagalog and many more. The pages of each book alternate between the foreign tongue and English translation and are read by native speakers of the former. These fine books are available in schools and libraries — and well worth badgering your local librarian to get on the case.

Elsewhere, I notice a seductive coming together of media in the shape of Superman: Alongside the release of the 2025 movie was a new book for middle-school readers, “Superman: Welcome to Metropolis: An Official Novel Inspired by the Film,” and its audiobook version (Listening Library, Unabridged, 2 hours, 39 minutes). Book and audio serve as a primer to Superman studies and, like the movie, the story expands to include Green Lantern, Mister Terrific and Hawkgirl.

Happily, for the Superman purist — spoiler alert — Lois Lane never catches on to who Clark Kent really is. Sean Kenin Elias-Reyes, a master of “WHAM,” “FWAMP” and “BOING,” narrates the audio version, which — though action-packed — is nothing like the bludgeoning slam-fest of the movie. I listened along while reading the book and thought that Elias-Reyes made a simple, rather corny story entertaining. He gets the characters right, including the foul Lex Luthor on whom he confers a greater aura of menace than that conveyed by the movie’s rosy-lipped, dreamy-eyed Nicholas Hoult.

Poetry, for the most part, was written to be spoken, but often poems will not surrender their meaning or reveal their genius without being read slowly in print or read aloud by a gifted reader, perhaps several times. The ideal approach would be — once again! — reading and listening simultaneously.

An excellent and readily available example are Shakespeare’s sonnets read by Alex Jennings (Naxos, 3 hours, 9 minutes), recorded in 2000 (before he attained his royal pedigree playing Prince Charles in “The Queen” and Edward VIII/Duke of Windsor in “The Crown”). Jennings’ delivery is beautifully paced, his voice resonant and empathetic. Not only is this a great recording, but each sonnet is given its own track, making relistening easy.

Novels whose nature depends greatly on regional ways of speaking are enhanced by their audio versions when read by native speakers or by those rare narrators skilled in mimicry in accent, cadence and manner. On the other hand, there are novels of this sort which, to appreciate fully, you want to have the book in your hand — to page back to reread passages: to figure out who’s who or what exactly is going on or, indeed, what it all means.

But to do both, to read certain books along with their audio versions is to experience the fullness of speech. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in Jim Norton’s audio rendition is the outstanding example of this (Naxos, Unabridged, 27 hours, 16 minutes). A Dubliner himself, Norton sweeps the novel out of the cloisters of close textual analysis and literary interpretation and returns it to the dimension of talk, to the many and varied voices of Dublin in 1904.

In his narration, the novel is no longer just about words, symbols and allegories — though it is that, too, and the footnotes in print versions are exceedingly helpful. In Norton’s skillful, bred-in-the-bone performance, the novel conjures Dublin of a vanished era realized in speech.

Listening and reading simultaneously takes time in quantities most of us do not possess. But after my own adventures in this practice, I can say that it is well worth the occasional excursion.