“I don’t really read for pleasure anymore,” he says, noting that he records about 50 audiobooks a year. In 2009, he was approached by audiobook producer Hachette Audio to record Infinite Jest. How could one even begin to fathom reading all that out loud? The book is 1,079 pages of fractured narrative and teleporting endnotes, a complex meditation on addiction, tennis, depression, and media.
For all practical purposes, he was right. “I don't think my stuff's meant to be read out loud,” David Foster Wallace told an interviewer in 1997, a year after his novel Infinite Jest was published. Pratt’s niche in the industry is nonfiction, though he has done a little bit of everything, including a notable work of supposedly un-recordable fiction. “I’m teaching them about performance style, research, how to connect with the material.” His most important lesson may be what he tells prospective students before they start: “Narrate a book inside a closet for two weeks and then tell me if you’re still interested.” “I’m teaching them about text analysis,” he tells me. He also instructs aspiring narrators, offering a course on the ins and outs of the trade. Sean Pratt has recorded over 800 audiobooks in his career. Welcome to the life of an audiobook narrator-a voice inside your head for hire.
Daunting? Are you psychosomatically parched? Keep going. Now, think about reading a full page out loud. It's just three meager sentences, but your mouth is probably feeling a little dry. There aren't any big words, foreign terms, or unruly surnames, though vocalizing it is still a chore. As a test, take the paragraph above and read it out loud. You guys make a great team.Īttempt to read something aloud, however, and that quiet teamwork is torn to shreds.
You have your own little narrator inside your head who probably sounds like you think you sound (or how you would like to sound), and you’ve likely developed a pretty good rapport with him or her over the years. Internalized reading, like what you are doing right now, is a pretty comfortable pursuit.
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