Annie Neugebauer

In the past year or so I’ve become a devout audiobook listener. I know some of you will think I’m waaaaay behind the curve, but I also know that some of you are probably still not believers yet. Let me tell you; I wasn’t a believer at first either. I associated audiobooks with boring childhood road trips and/or being too lazy to read. That bias had me seriously missing out.

I can’t do without my audiobooks now. I really can’t! I did get into them because of road trips – and they’re truly wonderful that; 14 hours won’t ever go by so quickly – but now I listen while I’m folding laundry, getting ready for bed, driving around town, going on walks, cleaning, and even during my lunch break. I feel like I almost double my available “reading” time, because now I can consume books when I’d never otherwise be able to. Hands free!

One of the most common reasons I’ve heard people express reluctance to get into them is a bad experience. Truly, the book you choose makes all the difference. A bad narrator will make any book miserable, and some books simply aren’t predisposed to good listening. I’ve found that complex, literary works are harder to concentrate on and follow aloud, so now I use audio for more of my leisure reads. Things that are fast-paced and/or funny are particularly fun, although I will say that there’s value to hearing exquisitely-written prose aloud too.

Another hesitation is price. Audiobooks are expensive! They take tons and tons of production hours, so it makes sense, but who has $30 to spend on every book? There are several alternatives. First of all, most public libraries provide audio rentals for free! Nowadays there are even temporary downloads, so you don’t even have to go pick it up in person or deal with CD swapping; you just get it on your phone. Library rentals are a great option for newbs who aren’t sure yet if they want to commit to audiobooks.

The option I’ve ended up with – and am madly in love with – is Audible. It’s a subset of Amazon devoted solely to audiobooks. Since it’s subscription style, you can pay for either one ($14.95) or two ($22.95) books a month, and any additional buys you make are 30% off. You also get access to tons of great free podcast subscriptions that include everything from short stories to comedy bits, and Audible runs daily deals for members that put specific books on sale for $2.99 each. The subscription prices drop even lower if you pay annually instead of monthly, so if you actually listen to the books, Audible is well worth the value.

If you do decide to give Audible a try, please use my referral links: get a free trial or subscribe to a gold membership! I’ll get a small amount of money and it won’t cost any extra for you. For everyone, your first month and two books are free, and you keep your books forever even if you cancel your membership. You can always cancel (or even pause) at any time, and if you ever get a dud narrator or crummy book, you can return it.

Another cool feature that Audible has is called Whispersync. I haven’t tried it yet, but if you buy a (discounted) ebook version of the same thing in audio, you can go back and forth between listening and reading and it’s supposed to save your spot. Has anyone tried it? It sounds too good to be true!

And to get you started – whether you check them out at your library, use your free trial, or subscribe through Audible – here are the four best audiobooks I’ve listened to so far:

I do get referral credit if you click through any of those books, too! (And I promise that’s not why I’m recommending Audible; I really do love it.) If nothing else you should do a free trial and listen to two of these amazing books for free. 🙂 I’ve posted raves about Beloved and Bird Box. I also have one about Gone Girl, but Flynn’s Sharp Objects is even better. And A Head Full of Ghosts was so good that I’m now reading a second book by Tremblay.

So, have you converted to audiobooks yet? Do you use Audible, the library, or something else? Recommendations for great listens are welcome!

I never plan the coincidence of what I’m reading, but the random mixture of my broad-ranging choices often presents interesting outcomes. More of my stories and poems than I can count sprout from a strange mixture of genres. I might be listening to a commercial horror audio book, reading challenging literary fiction in paperback, and slowly paging through a poetry anthology all at the same time. I read nonfiction for research, fun popular fiction to know what’s going on in the industry, classics to understand my genre lineage, funny books, sad books, sexy books, thoughtful books, outrageous books, and even my critique partners’ books. It’s always interesting to see what effects these various concoctions form in my mind, and it’s often delightfully serendipitous.

For the past chunk of time – probably a month at least, I would imagine – I’ve been reading a poetry collection called The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds as well as the long gothic novel The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. This happy coincidence taught me one important thing: the incredible value of reading slow.

When I read the opening poem in Olds’s collection, I had to put the book down. It struck me hard, and I wanted to stop and think about it. The next day, I read the second poem, and I swear by the end of it I was breathless. I had the type of reaction a poet can only dream of: wide eyes, pounding pulse, brain whirling. I had to close the book. I might have uttered choice profanity and lovingly clenched the book to my chest. I am honestly not kidding or even exaggerating. She’s that good.

And that was the crazy part: almost all of the poems were make-me-stop good. Over and over I tried to sit for longer chunks and read several poems, but I never could do it. I had to digest each one thoroughly, reread many again later before moving forward. I had to take it slow so I could better savor the work of who has certainly become my new favorite poet.

Switch to The Witching Hour. This book is over a thousand pages long. It’s dense as hell and certainly a commitment to start. Knowing that Anne Rice would take me there (and remembering how it happily took me my entire junior year of high school to read Queen of the Damned), I eagerly sank into the slow, rich, meticulous pace of it. It took me all of a week to realize three things. 1) I had been cheating myself by subconsciously choosing shorter books. 2) Long books can do things that shorter books simply cannot accomplish. 3) There is nothing more magical than getting lost in something you love when you know that something will last.

If you’ll forgive the adult metaphor (gasp! sex!), The Witching Hour reminded me why the height of a book’s plot is called the climax. Shorter novels can have wonderful climaxes too, of course, but it’s simply not possible for them to achieve the amount of sheer momentum and build-up of a longer book. More pay-in creates more pay-off. I knew these characters not just by their most interesting/unique attributes, but in all of their moods and aspects. I knew not just enough backstory to carry me through, but the entire history of them and their family. I knew not just what was at stake for this one couple, but for the world at large. By the time I got to page 900 I felt like I’d lived several lives and the end was nigh, and, again, I was left literally short of breath. It’s been a really long time since a book made me feel like that.

For some reason, it took the coincidence of Olds and Rice to make me realize how much I love this – reading slow – and how much I’d stopped doing it. I think this shift came about around the same time I started using Goodreads. Don’t get me wrong; I adore Goodreads. But keeping track of how many books I read each year makes me naturally number-hungry. I’m a very goal-oriented person, so even if I don’t set a concrete number I want to read each year, I still find myself subconsciously ticking off a checkmark each time I finish something new. The ramifications of that are that I choose easier, shorter, faster books almost without even thinking about it. I want more numbers, more checkmarks, and that made me quietly reluctant to pick up Tolstoy or The Historian.

What a loss.

At least now I’m aware of it, so I can stop letting quiet hesitations influence my reading choices. (And for the record, it’s not as if I was reading bad quicker reads; I was and will still read really amazing shorter novels too!) The first thing I did when I finished The Witching Hour was go out and buy the two sequels. Up next after those? I don’t know. Maybe Tolstoy or The Historian. 😉

There’s so much value in reading slow, reading thorough, reading thoughtfully. Hell, why not re-read? I’ve always heard writers talk about reading a book again right after finishing it the first time: once for story and once for craft. I’ve re-read books, sure, but not back to back. I think maybe I will now. Why not? It isn’t about the number of checkmarks I get. It’s about how much pleasure reading brings to my life, and like all good things, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth doing slowly.

Read less? Never.

Read fewer books? When they’re worth it: absolutely.

Do you find yourself reading fast and easy, or toward a goal? When was the last time you let yourself really savor something? Speed-readers and dawdlers alike welcome to the conversation! 🙂