Can we talk about audiobooks for a minute? They’re the perfect way to “read” while in school. All my homework this quarter consists of reading and writing assignments. For someone who loves to read, I find that by the time the day is done, the last thing I want to do is pick up another book and read. Audiobooks are perfect not only because someone else is doing the reading, but you can also multitask while you listen.
A fun fact about me is that I work for my school’s facilities team. You might be asking yourself why I chose this job that isn’t exactly that glamorous. Here’s the secret; audiobooks. I get an hour and a half of uninterrupted listening time where I don’t have to speak to a soul every day. It’s pretty therapeutic to not have to think about school or other commitments and just turn my brain off and clean all while being immersed in a book. Audiobooks also make me feel like a little kid again.
I grew up listening to audiobooks. Whether it was with my siblings in the backseat of the minivan as my mom drove us around downtown L.A. to all our little homeschooler commitments or as I commuted to school, guaranteed I’d be listening to a book. I’ll never forget riding the subway with my mom in Shanghai. We would split a set of headphones and listen to The Hunger Games to and from school. I find that listening to books always makes whatever I am doing go by faster. So if you have a long commute ahead of you, I highly recommend it.
Audiobooks are so much fun especially if you have a good narrator. For instance, right now I am in the middle of the Lord of The Rings and the narrator is half of the fun. I’d say 30% of the time if you ran into me while at work, you’d find me listening to a British man singing songs about Middle Earth. To be honest, I think it would be a struggle for me to physically read Lord of the Rings because of all the detail, but having it read to me makes it so much more fun.
If reading more books is one of your goals this year, audiobooks might be for you. I’ve listened to a pretty decent amount of books since I started working.
The books I’ve listened to so far:
- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Series – Ann Brashares
- The Harry Potter Series – J. K. Rowling
- The Lunar Chronicles – Marissa Meyer
- The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett
- A Man Called Ove -Fredrick Backman
- Becoming -Michelle Obama
- Currently listening to the second book of the Lord of the Rings – J.R.R Tolkien
That’s a total of 22 books and I still have five more weeks left in this quarter. I know that books are expensive and so are audiobooks and their streaming platforms. But if you use the app Hoopla, you can link your library card to the app and get books for free as long as your library has a subscription.
I think the nostalgia of being read to is something everyone deserves to have again. Let’s bring back the joy of a good bedtime story, or in my case a work-time story.