Hemingway on Bluetooth – The Boca Raton Tribune

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Hemingway on Bluetooth

By Claudia Catherine, March 15, 2026

So, there I was the other day at this wine bar in the West Village—one of those spots where the Pinot is cold and the judgment is room temperature—chatting with Anne. You know Anne, right? That “cult” friend. The one who sniffs new books like they’re high-grade glue and thinks the Kindle is a demonic invention designed to dismantle Western civilization.

We were talking about the latest Nobel Prize in Literature. I, feeling very pleased with myself, chimed in: “Girl, I devoured that book last week. A masterpiece. The character development, the drama…”

Anne looked at me over the rim of her thick-framed glasses (which are non-prescription, by the way, purely for the aesthetic) and asked: “Oh, did you get the hardcover first edition?”

“No,” I replied, innocently. “I listened to the audiobook while I was stuck in traffic on the BQE.”

The silence that fell over the table was awkward. Anne put down her wine glass as if I had confessed to a heinous crime. As if I had said I put pineapple on my pizza.

“You listened?” she whispered, scandalized. “Well then, honey, I hate to break it to you: you didn’t read it. You heard it. It’s different. Reading happens with the eyes. What you did was… a podcast.”

I sat there, my “reading” invalidated, feeling like an intellectual fraud.

But then I started thinking. This obsession with believing it only counts if it’s on paper, suffering through tiny font sizes and getting tendonitis from holding a heavy tome, is snobbery of the highest order. It’s “font sommeliery.”

At first, I even tried to fight against this whole audiobook thing. Standing there with earbuds jammed in, listening to some random voice tell me the story, unable to turn the page, missing the smell of paper, without that almost childish pleasure of placing a bookmark to know where I stopped? Torture. I just wanted to take an ax to the Bluetooth. The tool, not the writer.

A printed book is something else: a companion on the subway, in the waiting room, on the nightstand. Audiobooks, to me, felt like asking someone to chew my food and hand it to me already mushy. I prefer to chew the words myself, at my own pace, with the satisfying sound of a page turning.

Look, I still think nothing replaces the pleasure of thumbing through a physical book, but life is moving way too fast. In traffic, in line at Trader Joe’s, washing dishes—you can’t exactly crack open a hardcover and bury your nose in it during those times. That’s where the audiobook comes in as a modern life-hack: I put the headphones on, let the voice narrate, and presto, I’m “reading” while the world pushes me from one side to the other. It’s not the same ritual, there’s no new-book smell or bookmark, but it’s the practicality that forces me to use it, like ordering Uber Eats when you don’t have time to cook.

Especially in traffic. I put the headphones on, hit play, and suddenly the gridlock disappears. I’m no longer in a beat-up Corolla (no, that’s not my car, but I had to add some drama) in 90-degree heat; I’m in Czarist Russia with Anna Karenina. I’m in Macondo with the Buendías.

And Anne wants to tell me this doesn’t count?

The brain is a smart little beast. It doesn’t care if the word entered through the retina or the eardrum. The process of “hallucinating the story” (because reading is just hallucinating while awake) is the same. The cortex lights up like a Christmas tree.

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