Yes, I’ve listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I’ve wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

In this remark, Oates treats audiobooks not as a lesser substitute for print but as a distinct aesthetic encounter. She frames listening as an “investigation” into how narrative voice, pacing, and tone change when a text is performed aloud—especially when the work is her own. The fascination she describes points to the way audiobooks foreground sound: cadence, emphasis, and the narrator’s interpretive choices can reveal different emotional contours than silent reading. Implicitly, the quote also acknowledges a shift in contemporary literary consumption, where authors and readers increasingly meet fiction through performance and audio media.