Saturday 28 February 2015

Babbling about Books (3): Why I Adore Audiobooks (and you could too!)

I've mentioned briefly in a couple of posts before that last year I fell in love with audiobooks. Due to a busy, stressful final year of high school I'd fallen off the reading wagon, which sucked big time. Fortunately a teacher suggested that I try to listen to audiobooks and I've been hooked ever since!

Here are five reasons why I adore audiobooks:

1) They make my commute more enjoyable

Starting Monday I'll be busing to Uni for about 4 hours a week and walking to and from work about 3 hours. That's seven hours where I can't avoid the commute or get there any faster. Just as well I've found a way to enjoy it!

Listening to audiobooks during that time makes me feel productive and gives me some of my reading fix  Especially in the mornings it wakes me up and forces me to start focusing for the day so I don't miss any important details. Most importantly to me, I feel that audiobooks make my daily commute pass faster.

2) I'm making (minimal) progress on my TBR

Many readers like myself have a ridiculous amount of books they want to read ASAP, but sadly we can't read all the things at once. Audiobooks helps me chip away at my staggering TBR list on Goodreads, which I'm extremely grateful for. I'm a slowish reader and there's only so much reading my eyes can take before I get headaches for a week. Now I can wear my ears out too! ;)

3) I love being read to

I miss when my parents read stories to me when I was little. It was really soothing and comforting to hear. Now that I'm older I can listen to even more stories being read to me with (dare I say it) narrators who are more skilled at doing the different voices.

4) Audiobooks are available for free

As I'm a savvy student I love that audiobooks are avaliable for free from my local library in two formats: on CDs and on my personal device. I use the latter as I can download them onto my iPad mini via the app Borrowbox for two weeks and listen to them while I'm commuting. If your local library doesn't have eaudiobooks accessible on your personal device, sites such as Open Culture and LibriVox have a whole range of them for free.

5) I can listen to my favourite books in new formats

I often wonder whether I should go back and reread more books that I know I love instead of reading a bunch of new ones that I don't know I will love. Almost always the latter wins out as I could make a wonderful new discovery. Now with eaudiobooks I can do both at the same time!

At my local library I'm able to revisit The Mortal Instruments Series, The Keys to the Kingdom Series and The Chaos Walking Trilogy via eaudiobook. As I haven't read any of these from the start to the end for donkeys years I'm pretty excited to get onto that. I'm also curious how they'll sound with someone else narrating them to me instead of reading it in my head.

Have you ever tried audiobooks before? Why/why not?

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