Voices Inside My Head

The interesting thing about reading a book by someone you know is that it very much feels as if you’re being told a long story, or have a long, very one-sided conversation with that particular individual. Typically, when I sit down to read a book or an essay, my brain fills in the author’s voice with one of the dozen generic mental “reading voices” I’ve developed over a couple decades of reading. I suspect this is fairly normal for most habitual readers. These voices can be shaped by what I know about the author: age, sex, etc. Authors whom I read regularly tend to “sound” the same each time I read them, though their voices can be modified if I discover that, say, the author is actually 23, not, I previously suspected, 40.

But when reading a long form, semi-casually written book (something that’s not academic) by someone whom I see and converse with regularly, I get the odd sensation of sitting in a room with that particular person and listening to them talk. This changes the whole way I read, inflicting the author’s personal speech patterns and tone of voice on the text. This becomes especially confusing when the portions of the writing don’t match up with my perception of how the author typically speaks.

This is not to say, of course, that it’s an experience I want to avoid; the world (or at least my small alcove of it) is a much better place any time someone I know and like publishes a book.