While I’ve written previously about bumps in the road to enjoying audiobooks and my take on that score hasn’t changed, I have to say, when they work for me, they really work.
Anyone who’s a regular reader of this site will have been lulled half to sleep lately by my monthly What I Read This Month posts which have largely been lacking… well… anything actually completed, even if there are many books that I tried to start but stopped for myriad reasons. A big part of that dip in anything completed is frankly a lack of time in the last seven months or so since we got Radar. That’s just a fact of having a dog: They tend to eat up one’s time (as well as a great many other things they can get in their mouths). Which only takes more away from my already lacking free time. Which makes for less accomplished elsewhere, including book reading.
Enter audiobooks.
Because one very nice thing about them — as of course was widely promoted when they first became a thing; I’m not saying anything new here, but just happily rediscovered — is that by their nature, you can listen to them at least some of the time that you don’t have time to sit and read.
Driving? Audiobook.
Doing laundry? Audiobook.
Raking leaves? Audiobook.
… and depending on one’s general busyness (*ahem*), listening during other activities can really add up. A couple of weeks back I finished listening to a book whose analog format is 484 pages, which I started listening to 5 days earlier. Particularly as slowly as I read, I can’t recall the last time that I got through nearly 100 pages in one day, let alone day after day. So here, listening to a book was a much faster process than trying to read the same book (which I couldn’t even get my hands on from the library anyway, so added bonus there).
I’m still not saying that audiobooks are a cure-all, but if you find yourself too busy to sit and enjoy a book, check your local libraries for audiobooks, and see if they can connect with any phone apps to help with listening on the go, and give them a shot. If it’s the right material, done the right way, you may be pleasantly surprised at how many more books you can enjoy that you couldn’t otherwise.