Do you like Audio Books?
My experience is both limited and mixed.
I listened to a few books on long drives. I can firmly state
that they helped me get through the long commutes. I have a friend who swears gardening
and house cleaning are much improved with a good book in her ears.
But it is a different sort of experience. It is not reading, as the content and plot are absorbed, I suspect, by a different part of
the brain.
For one thing, the complete focus that reading while not
doing anything else is gone. Paying attention to the traffic or the weeds is
not trivial. For another, the emotional flavor of the words is colored by the
reading voice, and the reading voice is rarely the inner voice inside your
head.
In other words, (pun intended) the reader makes all the
difference.
Here
is a link to a good post about writers who are tempted to produce/read
their own audio books.
So far, my personal experience is that for less demanding commercial
books, audio books are fine. Especially with a good reader. Exquisite literary
fiction still needs my reading eyes.
