Listening is more efficient than reading: When we read, we absorb print with our eyes and translate it into “meaning,” a cumbersome process that requires us first to see the words, then to make sense of them, and finally to employ our imaginations to conjure up events and sounds and characters that aren’t there. Reception by aural means is more direct: All you have to do is listen. Not only that, you can multitask, driving to work or walking the dog.

you can impulse-buy Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald while you’re shivering at a bus stop and have it show up on your Kindle reader almost instantly. But there is something about the act of listening that invigorates the mind.

“In the history of mankind, words were heard before they were seen,” wrote Albert B. Lord,