Hearing of Your Home
There is a special type of joy reserved for a very specific experience one can have while reading: the feeling of hearing of your home.
There is a special type of joy reserved for a very specific experience one can have while reading: the feeling of hearing of your home.
For stories to be immersive, they have to be set in a particular location in time and space. Usually, novelists write of what’s familiar — they anchor their stories in their hometowns, their adopted cites, their motherlands. They sneak little references and spatial tags into their descriptions to underscore that place’s importance to them.
When I was listening to 100 audiobooks in a month, I heard references to New York City all the time. At least a quarter of the books mentioned NYC in some way, and many of them were such that the city played a prominent role in the narrative.
The feeling is even more exciting when an author mentions a specific space as you’re in that space, which happened to me three times. I was walking on Central Park South as Richard Feynman was talking about the bottom edge of Central Park in The Character of Physical Law; I was walking on Nostrand Avenue as Ali Wong was describing her crappy boyfriend who lived on Nostrand Avenue in Dear Girls; and I was listening to Bill Hayes in Insomniac City complain about the crowdedness of the L train while I was riding the L train.
These moments always made me smile, and I wished I could lift my headphones and turn to the person next to me on the subway and say “Oh my god! The book I’m listening to is literally describing the L train right now! Isn’t that crazy?!” But I would get no shared enthusiasm from my subterranean comrades — all I imagine I’d get would be strange looks and the subtle scoot backward that means “Get the hell away from me…”
God I love this city!
That’s the thing about books: they’re not easily shared. Sure, I can recommend a book to you, and you can read it, and we can talk about it afterwards, but it’s not the same as watching a movie together. With movies and plays and operas and dance performances (even art galleries to an extent), there’s a shared time and space that creates a unified experience. That unity is really valuable, and it’s not really achievable with books.
It may be a little easier with audiobooks, and there have been times when I’ve listened to audiobooks on a speaker with someone else; it’s always been nice, but it’s a rare occurrence.
That unsharability speaks to the nature of books in general. In the end, books are deeply personal, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. The joys of hearing of your home can’t be accurately conveyed to your fellow subway riders, and maybe that’s ok. I get to savor the feeling on my own. It’s like a massage: I can explain to you how it feels, but you won’t experience the sensation with me.
For every book that mentioned New York, there were others that mentioned Boston, San Francisco, DC, Berlin, Lagos, Moscow, Shanghai, Bogota, you name it. These place names brushed me by as just little details, but to readers living in those places, the same passages become charged with sentimentality, connection, and pride.
That pride is theirs, just as New York City’s is mine, and though the places may be different, the joy of hearing of your home is universal.