Harold Bloom, the literary critic, once expressed doubt about the audiobook. “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” he told the Times. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” While this is perhaps true for serious literary criticism, it’s manifestly not true when it comes to experiencing a book purely for the pleasure of its characters, setting, dialogue, drama, and the Scheherazadean impulse to know what happens next—which, all apologies to Bloom, is why most people pick up a book in the first place. Homer, after all, was an oral storyteller, as were all “literary artists” who came before him, back to when storytelling, around the primal campfire, would have been invented—grounds for the argument that our brains were first (and thus best?) adapted to absorb long, complex fictions by ear, rather than by eye.

That’s an idea I ran past the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran (whom I profiled in 2009). Rama answered via e-mail, saying: “Language comprehension and production evolved in connection with HEARING probably 150,000 yrs ago and to some extent is ‘hard wired’; whereas writing is 5000 to 7000 years old—partially going piggyback on the same circuits, but partially involving new brain structures like the left angular gyrus (damage to which disrupts reading writing and arithmetic). So it’s possible LISTENING to speech (including such things as cadence, rhythm and intonation) is more spontaneously comprehensible and linked to emotional brain centers —hence more evocative and natural.” He did add a caveat: “On the other hand reading allows you to pause and reflect and go back to do a second take.” (Though I’d argue that that’s what the rewind button is for.)

I listened to my first audiobook three years ago, when I had to master an interview subject’s massive literary œuvre in a very short time and realized that, to do it, I would have to use every available moment of the day—including those when traditional reading was impossible: walking home after dropping my son at school; jogging; grocery shopping; doing dishes. Since then, I’ve become a habitué of the audiobook section of my local library, renting and illegally ripping “books” to my iPod. I’ve discovered that audiobooks are (among other things) an ideal way to get to know a work that you can’t, for whatever occult reason, bring yourself to read in book form. I’d taken several runs at two late Updike novels, “Seek my Face” and “Terrorist,” and gotten bogged down in both. I have now listened to them as audiobooks and can report that they contain much of Updike’s typical brilliance that I would have missed had I stuck to Bloom’s method of mastering a book.

Inherent in Bloom’s criticism is the idea that one’s “inner ear” (by which I think he means one’s private and instinctual response to a text) is influenced by what is being done to one’s “outer ear,” which receives an interpretation of the book by an intermediary, an actor whose idiosyncratic reading shapes and colors the text. Bloom is correct about this, but I’ve discovered that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Far from it. There are exquisite pleasures to be derived from hearing how a talented actor brings forth characters and stories—indeed, often in a way that points up one’s own inner-ear tone deafness to certain books. Not long ago, I rented the audiobook of “The Sun Also Rises,” not so much because I felt a burning compulsion to reëxperience Hemingway’s novel (which existed in my memory as a vaguely tiresome meditation on machismo, sexual impotence, and bullfighting) but because I was curious to hear how the actor William Hurt interpreted it.

Hurt, eschewing the kind of caricatured, brawny-man speaking style favored by readers-aloud of Hemingway, went for an eccentric, slightly stilted, halting, almost delicate diction as Jake Barnes—a strange-seeming choice that at first clashed badly with my own inner ear but that now, after repeated, delighted listenings, seems like the only way to render Barnes’s voice, since it best accentuates the deadpan hilarity that is too little commented upon in Hemingway. I’d failed to understand, until I listened to Hurt’s performance, just how funny and touching the book is. (To be fair, there must be examples of audiobooks where a lousy reader is the equivalent of a badly cast actor in the lead role of a book’s movie-version—James Caan as Rabbit Angstrom?—and threatens to ruin that literary work for you forever; but this hasn’t happened to me yet.)

It was the magic of a man named Frank Muller reading “The Great Gatsby” that made me realize that audiobook narration is an art form all its own. As I listened (and re-listened) to Muller’s reading of “Gatsby,” I recognized an almost supernatural quality to the way he inhabited each character, whether he was rendering the watchful, sensible narrator, Nick Carraway, or bullying Tom Buchanan, or even flighty Daisy—often in scenes where rapid-fire dialogue has him shifting back and forth between all three within milliseconds. But perhaps most amazing (for its cagey subtlety) was his enigmatic, chimerical Gatsby—a character Fitzgerald confessed to having had trouble fully seeing (in an inscription of the book to a friend in 1927, he admitted that the character of Gatsby was “thin,” and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, complained of the same thing, while acknowledging that this vagueness was also an important element of the book.)

Muller, reading Gatsby’s dialogue, fleshes him out—just enough, and not too much—by adopting a tone of deceptively subtle casualness not be mistaken for candor; for all the breezy friendliness of his address, there’s something edgy and withholding, something guardedly clipped, about those “old sports”; his tone flickers between sweetly naïve openheartedness (as when extending the palm of friendship to Nick) and something a good deal more sinister, as when he raps out, “That’s my affair,” when Nick asks what business he is in. So uncannily good was Muller—whose name I’d never heard before—that I had to Google him, and discovered that I was far from the first to notice his brilliance. An experienced stage and screen actor, he is also a legend in the audiobook world (a writer at The Los Angeles Times said he was “the best reader I have ever heard;” The New York Times Book Review called him “some kind of genius”). Muller himself gave a glimpse into the challenges of making audiobooks when he told an interviewer, in 2001, “Playing one character is daunting enough, and that is usually all that is asked of an actor, but in a single voice recording you play them all. All the motivations, desires, hopes, and conflicts one character may experience interact constantly with those of the other characters. The development and consistent realization of all those characterizations is quite a challenge.”

Muller, as it happens, was there at the birth of commercial audiobooks, having got his start in 1979, when he made the first-ever recording for the fledgling New York-based company Recorded Books, reading Jack London’s “Sea Wolf.” (A rival business, Books on Tape, had sprung up at the same time in California). Recorded Books was the brainchild of Henry Trentman, a travelling salesman who spent hours on the road but didn’t want to listen to the radio. Seeking actors, he put up a casting-call sheet at a regional theatre in Washington, D.C., which is how he found Muller. Trentman later said that, when he got Muller in a booth and heard what he could do with a text and a microphone, “I knew I had a business.”