Last month, I tried my first audiobook ever and shared my thoughts on the experience here. Now my friend, Carrie, explains her own unique perspective on audiobooks. (Read her recent .)
Really, just who would read…or rather, listen…to these things?
For about ten years, that was my thinking on audiobooks. My audiobook horizons weren’t widened until 2011, when I heard that graphic artists at my work place were not only listening to them, but had started a little library on the company’s free storage server. Now I was paying more attention to the server I had only before used for music when I got bored of my iPod’s limited selection.
I’ve read many books, but I had never listened to one. Listening to audio books reminded me of the stories I had read and the old photos I had seen of families gathered around a big, boxy radio, listening to comedy sketches or FDR’s fireside chats.
But I listen to books while I work on a computer with two monitors, in a non-descript cubicle in the center of a modern office building. People have often asked me how I can work and listen to an audio book at the same time, and personally I still think my explanation leaves room for improvement. Not everyone can simultaneously perform their work and listen to a book, but because the nature of my job involves a lot of comparing information between two computer screens and flipping from window to window in a relatively isolated environment where members of my department send internal emails instead of pick up the phone, listening to audio books is just another alternative to listening to music. Perhaps the ability to multi-task also helps in completing an eight hour work day and listening to the latest best seller.
I’ve read chick lit by Jennifer Weiner, mysteries by Mary Higgins Clark, and later moved on to non-fiction and biographies. Howard Hughes’s eccentricities have captivated and infuriated me, Agatha Christie’s 11 day disappearance has kept me wondering, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City has me looking forward to its film version. As in traditional reading, I’ve had to backtrack to remember dates and places in the narrative. Of course when the office gets busy or a deadline hovers, I click the pause button on my computer, and resume the book when time allows.
Over the past year, I’ve “read” more books by audio than on paper. But does listening to an audio book count as “real” reading? I’d like to think so, but some of my friends disagree. Perhaps they still have the mind set that I held ten years ago, or they have some deep philosophical feelings about the technology, who knows! Since life gets busier and busier, having the ability to “read” multiple chapters daily makes me appreciate the strange chance I have of logging on to my computer, completing behind-the-scenes work on the latest digital advertising, and racing around the nation’s capital with Robert Langdon in The Lost Symbol.
