The Career I Never Planned Started With A Library Card
For International Literacy Day: how a love of reading turned into audiobooks, textbooks for students who couldn't see the page, and the best thing I have ever done in a booth.
I could read before I could tie my shoes. (This is not a brag, merely to set the scene.)
Two years old. Nobody in my house made a project out of it. I just wanted the words, and once I had them I never gave them back.
My son did the same thing. Started reading at two. He is four and a half now and already working at a first grade level. (Ok, now THAT is a humble brag. I'll never not sing my kid's praises.)
Today is International Literacy Day (September 8th), and this one is the 60th. UNESCO started it in 1966, and the theme this year is "Literacy for people, the planet and prosperity." Sixty years in, roughly 739 million youth and adults still lack basic literacy skills, and about four in ten kids worldwide are not hitting minimum reading proficiency.
Those numbers are staggering and abstract at the same time, so let me make it small and specific instead. Let me tell you what reading actually did for one guy in a fedora.
"You'd Have To Move To LA"
Early 2000s. New York City.
I wanted character work. I wanted animation. I wanted to be the guy making the funny noises for a living, and I was told, flat out and more than once, that if I wanted that life I would need to move to Los Angeles.
I could not do that.
So I stayed. I did commercial work. I built a career on what was actually in front of me instead of the career I had drawn up in my head, and if you are a voice actor reading this in a market that is not LA, I need you to hear that sentence twice.
And this was before ANY of what we do now. No remote sessions. No patch. No "send me a link and I'll direct you from my kitchen." If you were recording, you were physically standing in a studio, in the room, with an engineer on the other side of the glass.
Which turns out to matter a great deal to this story.
The Question That Changed Everything
One day, in one of those studios, an engineer asked me a question between takes.
"You ever thought about narrating audiobooks? We've got some coming through."
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
The titles were youth and middle grade novels. Kids' books. Chapter books. The exact shelf I had lived on as a small person with a library card and no sense of moderation.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about career paths: audiobook narration was NOT on my radar. Not at the start, not at all. It was not on the whiteboard. It was not in the five year plan. It was not the thing I moved to New York to do.
And I was completely, thoroughly, accidentally prepared for it.
Because narrating a middle grade novel asks for exactly two things. A love of reading, so you can actually track a story across nine hours and know where it is going before the listener does. And a love of characterization, so that the twelve year old and the grandmother and the talking badger all show up as different people who happen to share a throat.
I had been training for that job since I was two years old. I just did not know the job existed at that time.
A soft aside to my voice actors: audiobooks are a WHOLLY different beast. Different stamina, different prep, different math, different relationship with your own hydration. It is not "commercial work but longer." It is a discipline. I do not get to do it nearly as often as I would like these days, but when I do, I revel in it. If you are curious about the genre, go in with your eyes open about the time commitment, not the romance of it.
The “Role” I’m Most Proud Of
That same studio came back with a second question. Would I be willing to narrate full textbooks for visually impaired students?
I did a bevy of them. Junior high. High school. Top to bottom, cover to cover. Not the highlights. Not the fun parts. Every chapter, every caption, every chart, every "see figure 4.2," read out loud so a student who couldn't use the printed page could sit in the same class as everybody else and do the same homework as everybody else.
There's no demo cut from that work. No award. No reel moment. No credit anywhere.
Not one person who has ever heard those recordings knows my name. Not one. I was a voice in somebody's headphones during a study hall, and then I was gone, and then they graduated.
That is by far the most unsung thing I have ever done, and it is the thing I'm most proud of.
I say it constantly and I mean it every time. I prefer to be behind the mic, or below the frame.
Somewhere out there are grown adults who got through sophomore year listening to me read their chemistry book. They'll never know it was me. But I know.
I will never top that. I have voiced things with much bigger logos on them. None of them come close.
Why This Day Matters To Me
Reading is not a nice hobby. It is a door.
Some kids get handed the key early and never think about it again. Some kids never get handed anything. And some ADULTS are still standing at that door, in their thirties and forties and sixties, having built entire lives around hiding the fact that they cannot read the sign, the form, the bottle, the bedtime story.
That last group is the one we forget, and they are the ones who need the least judgment and the most access.
Everything good in my professional life traces back to a two year old who wanted the words. The characters, the audiobooks, the textbooks, the puppets, the whole ridiculous wonderful career. All of it downstream of reading.
So if you can read this sentence, somebody somewhere gave you something.
Go give it to somebody else.
Free Places To Start
Not one of these costs a dime.
For kids and the grownups teaching them
Reading Rockets (readingrockets.org) - free, research-based guidance on how to actually teach a child to read, from oral language all the way through comprehension. Their Reading 101 course is free.
Reading Is Fundamental / Literacy Central (rif.org/literacy-central) - the oldest and largest children's literacy nonprofit in the US, with free digital books, activities and book lists.
Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (imaginationlibrary.com) - mails free books to kids from birth to age five in participating communities. Check if yours is one.
For adults who never learned
The National Literacy Directory (nld.org) - a searchable directory of thousands of local literacy programs and GED testing centers across the country. Type in a zip code. That is the whole barrier.
ProLiteracy (proliteracy.org) - adult literacy resources, and if you want to be the one doing the TEACHING, they will train you as a volunteer tutor
For readers who cannot use print
NLS and BARD, Library of Congress (loc.gov/nls) - free audio and braille books, magazines and playback equipment for anyone in the US who cannot read standard print. All ages.
Bookshare (bookshare.org) - an enormous accessible ebook library, free for qualified US students of any age.
Learning Ally (learningally.org) - human-narrated audio textbooks and literature for students with print disabilities. Real narrators. Real people. This is the work I described above, and it is still going.
And the one nobody thinks of first anymore: your local public library card. Free, today, in about four minutes, and it comes with the Libby app and thousands of audiobooks attached to it. PLUS 1000s of movies and tv shows to either check out or stream now. FREE! (For a lot of the movies I don’t already own, that’s how I watch the flicks for my podcast! “The Poster Says…” all about those few WORDS on the movie poster!)
Nate Begle is a voice actor, audio producer, writer, director, puppeteer and VO coach.
