wait for it
lots of driving = lots of time. normally i just turn on the radio and listen to mpr or some pop song while i drive to work, but on the weekends i’ve got 3 hours of driving time that could be filled by…
podcasts? yes. audiobooks? yes. mostly audiobooks. i’m multitasking! kind of.
reading a book book and listening to an audiobook are completely different experiences. a book book holds your attention undivided. a book book will let you zoom over words as fast as your brain processes them. a book book will let you reread a sentence over and over without having to fiddle with controls.
an audiobook, unless you’re sitting in your living room, raptly staring at your playing device, does not have your undivided attention. while i’m driving, i listen, then i’m worried about that guy coming up awfully quick on my bumper. then i’m listening, and then i’m seeing some weirdo trying to merge in a 75-mph lane at 35 mph and trying to move over. i’m listening, then i’ve got to figure out how to handle all this traffic. oh! an orange cone! but, for the most part, i know what’s going on.
if i want to reread something or skip ahead, i need to mess around with my controls. in fact, i don’t know if i want to skip ahead, ever, because i can’t do that overall skim with my eyes on a page while i’m mid-paragraph. plus, it’s frowned upon to mess around with your phone while driving.
an audiobook has one pace: spoken word. now, granted, i can scrub it up: 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, etc., but i find that anything faster than 1.5x is just too scrubbed to make sense of the words.
that said, some books were just made (written?) for audiobook.
i just finished neil patrick harris’ autobiographical choose your own adventure, and i would HIGHLY recommend checking out the audiobook. while you’d think that a choose your own adventure would not lend well to the audio format, he and the producer worked to make it absolutely great.
he reads it himself, and while you might be able to infer certain things from written word, it was great to hear his inflection as he intended in his writing. it was great hearing him say “LEGEN – wait for it – DARY.” it was even better hearing him intone “THEEEE EENNNDDD” whenever you met your untimely demise in one of the “adventures.”
the best part? HE KNOWS HOW TO PRONOUNCE MISCHIEVOUS*. wtg, nph.
four stars: would choose to adventure listen again!
*where is that I after the v? THERE IS NONE. quit inserting it. say mischief. now add an “ous” after it. TADA. mischievous.