Monday, April 10, 2017

Calling All Audiobook Listeners


     Call me old-fashioned, but I rarely read books on Kindle. I like running my fingers across an embossed cover or up and down a deckled edge, and, as I’ve posted before, I jot notes throughout the chapters using my own key words and symbols.

     Yet, there is one exception to my old-fashionedness when it comes to reading novels: audiobooks.

     A dear friend recommended books on tape five years ago, and for me, there was no turning back. Oh, how much time I had wasted in a car! I commute to my job in the city for 50 minutes a day, each way. Now, I actually welcome traffic jams. (Okay, that might be a stretch.) But, true to what my friend had predicted, when I’m alone, I listen to snippets en route to the grocery, the gym, and the nail salon.

     Eventually, I graduated from shuffling 10-CD box sets to Amazon Audible. (Love. It.) While at a stoplight in rush hour, I can download a book from my wish list with one click on my iPhone and be “reading" a new story by the time my foot pushes the pedal.

     I find unexpected joy in listening to books being read to me. Perhaps it’s some subconscious throw-back to when I was a girl, to when my Memaw read me MADELINE. With audiobooks, a professional narrator often adds something that heightens my experience. This can be the varied character voices or a story interpretation—with the pauses, the cadence, the emphasis, the tone. The sounds of the words strung together by the author make music to my ears that my classic rock radio simply cannot.

     At times I have read a “real book” and listened to it, too (sometimes during the same period, other times years apart). The best of both worlds!

Here are two of my favorite audiobooks with stories that shift between the past and present:


Other awesome audiobooks you might enjoy:








You've heard of a TBR (To Be Read) List. Here are a couple of books I loved reading, and now they're on my "TBL" List. As in Yangsze Choo's audiobook above, the narrators for the books below are the authors!




What audiobooks are your favorites? 

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