28 April, 2016. 10:34
ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
SOME OF HIS MATES have start squealing like a pig whenever he enters a room.
Close friends introduce him to other people as “my dumb friend who can’t read” and “the pig man”.
It’s not because he loves to strap on the feedbag and eat himself into a coma, nor does he snout around dancefloors at 3am looking for a mattress.
It’s because he’d rather listen to an audiobook than spend the same amount of time reading the text.
Though he breaks shit up and throws it in a skip for a living, 26-year-old Alistair Dink is an avid listener of books, sometimes even enjoying up to three or four a year.
“I got into audiobooks because it’s just too hard to read sometimes,” he said.
“Those big words and dumb metaphors need to be spelt out to me. I’m not a clever person, but I love good stories and shit,”
“Once I read a Matthew Rielly book in high school but it took me fuckin’ ages and I kept forgetting what happened all the time. With these books, I can get some wok-headed-cunt like Stephen Fry to read me Harry Potter or something on the way to work. It’s grouse as fuck.”
However, a trend that’s got publishers and smug people who actually read very nervous.
Audiobook clubs have sprung up all over the country, where young people gather around in share house living rooms, drink cheap wine and enjoy a smorgasbord of dips.
They don’t actually do any reading, they just gather around and fiddle with their phones while the audiobook plays in the background.
23-year-old office person Kate Wertley agrees that listening to audiobooks as a group is definitely the future of literature because being on your own is boring.
“Yeah we, ah, started this like group chat on Facey where we invited peeps [people] over to our house to listen to Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt because it’s such a good story,” she said.
“First, it was like four of us, then my friend Dylan brought some wine like a month ago, then we got the dips, next thing we have like a whole club of us who gather once a week to listen to audiobooks and chat about books and stuff. It’s pretty cool,”
“We’re still on Anglea’s Ashes because we keep having to go back when people don’t show up one week, but is kind of shit but it’s such a good story.”
If this story was not the tip of a tragedy then I would have a good belly laugh too.
It has been well established that reading books, especially high end literature (as opposed to the “what comes next” potboilers), is one of the best ways to stave off dementia.
As the population ages there will be the coherent book worms and the incoherent soup dribblers who never realised that the grey thing in their head had to be used or would be wasted: in both senses of the word.
Does this guy follow Leigh Sales on twitter?