Are bad listeners bad readers?

From The Plymouth Adventure by Ernest Gebler (Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, 1950):

Sometimes at night he tried to read; but did not often succeed in doing so for very long. Reading was too like listening to someone else talk; and he had never learnt how to listen. His attempts at reading usually ended in his holding imagined polemical dialogues between himself and an adversary - who was always roundly outtalked, if not outwitted.

Hmmm. Food for thought.