Interested in listening to audiobooks but don't know where to start?
You've probably had someone define you as a visual, aural, or kinesthetic learner sometime during your childhood. Maybe you even began to identify with that definition of yourself. I, for one, always maintained that I was a visual learner. I never thought I could listen to an entire novel and be able to pick up subtleties, follow characters, or even maintain my understanding of the plot without being able to see anything. But my younger sister used to marathon the Harry Potter audiobook series on her iPod over and over, so I figured I would give it a try.
The first audiobook I ever listened to was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows during a car ride from Chicago to upstate New York and back a few years ago. As a passenger, listening to a book on my iPod helped pass the time. I was able to devote nearly all of my attention to it. I came away from my first audiobook experience impressed, but I wasn't sold. Not yet. I liked the feel of a book in my hands, the action of physically turning a page--and I still do. But there is also something powerful in hearing a book read to you. In his book The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach described reading aloud as an intimate act. Many cultures were born out of oral storytelling. Many of us grew up as our parents read storybooks to us. We are told "stories" every day: crazy blind dates our coworkers were subjected to, the retellings of movies we probably wouldn't see anyway, the what-happened-last-night's our friends whisper to us in excruciating detail over the phone. So it really isn't that far removed. It really isn't that much of a stretch to listen to a book rather than reading it.
Nearly a year after I graduated college, I found myself in a temporary office job. Boring, as most temporary office jobs are. Filling, data entry, sending mass spam emails, staring at the electric glow of an out-of-date computer monitor. The kind of job you could do without thinking, or nearly so. Then one (glorious) day after I had long exhausted my iPod music library, while procrastinating and skimming the offerings on the Android Market, I downloaded the Ambling Book Reader, followed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet recorded by volunteers with the Librivox Project.
Cue life changing moment...
Since that day in March 2011, I have listened to at least 399.7 hours of spoken word (or so boasts my iTunes library).
Okay, so, maybe not all of you have day jobs where you can "tune out" and still accomplish your daily tasks with regular accuracy. When I'm not working as an office temp, I still manage to get my audiobook fix in by listening in the car or on the train, listening while knitting, cooking, or painting my nails. I've seen my sister listen to Harry Potter on headphones while she applies her makeup, brushes her teeth, and ignores the rest of the family at dinner time.
And I've found that listening to audiobooks has given me a chance to experience a lot of literature I never would have had the time for otherwise while still working days, attending graduate school classes, and writing short stories. My discovery of audiobooks has certainly made my job and commute more enjoyable, and my life more fulfilling. I have a list of 56 books read/listened to in 2011 that I can be proud of - and all the knowledge of life and humanity and literature that comes with it.
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If you haven't already guessed, I will be using this blog to review audiobooks, but also to promote literacy through their use. We live in a fast-paced world. Not everyone has time to sit down and crack open a 300+ page novel. But who doesn't have time in their commute to get through a couple chapters a day of that book they've been meaning to read forever?
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