If you love reading as much as I do, you know there’s never enough time for all the books you want to read. And being busy with school certainly doesn’t improve the situation. That’s why I appreciate audiobooks so much: they’re the perfect reading solution for busy people. And there are tons of other reasons to love them:
1. They make the walk to class more interesting.
Those five or ten minutes of walking can be quite boring. Listening to a book while you scurry through the halls makes the journey much more exciting. Plus, you make use of what scant spare time you have to ingest as many books as possible. Even if you have just four intervals of five minutes of traveling a day, that’s still twenty minutes of extra book time! And that’s a low estimate if your classes are really spread out.
2. They’re perfect for multitasking.
Doing chores is one hundred percent more entertaining with an audiobook playing. More time for books, and less time spent thinking about how much you hate folding clothes.
3. They have incredible narrators.
Some of the people who narrate audiobooks are downright amazing. They do incredibly perfect and wonderfully varied voices for different characters, and the performances really make the words come to life. Some books I can’t even imagine now without the narrators’ voices.
4. They allow you to be lazy.
As I said, I love reading, but occasionally it’s nice to not have to put in the effort of actually comprehending words on a page and let someone else do it for me. You can just lay there, close your eyes, and become fully immersed in another world in a way that’s wholly different from movies, TV, or even actual reading.
5. They’re really easy to access.
There are tons of ways you can get access to audiobooks. There are books on CD for “old-fashioned” CD players and radios (this is how I started with audiobooks, and I listened to so many that I developed an instinctual reaction of unreasonable anger at anything that sounds like a scratched CD repeating itself). For phones, there are lots of different apps you can use to listen to all kinds of books, many even for free. My favorite is Overdrive, where you use your local library account to borrow audiobooks. Plus they return themselves automatically, so no late fees!