Easy Listening - Audiobooks

November 30, 2010

My husband and I like listening to audiobooks together while we work in our home office. We also listen to audiobooks when we go on trips. His family lives far enough away that we can usually get a book done on the way there and another one on the way home. We’ve listened to thrillers like Dean Koontz and John Saul, sci-fi like Kevin J. Anderson and Jack Campbell, authors we’ve chosen because their powers of description are so good like Pulitzer Prize author Richard Russo, and our favorite repeat books are J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and his Lord of the Rings series.

Last year, we went to Montana with another couple to a camp at Glacier National Park. We listened to Stephen E. Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage which is a biography of Meriwether Lewis. Often, we would be driving through an area of the country that Lewis and Clark had just explored in the book. This made the trip even more fun. It also made the two day drive less taxing. On the way home, we listened to Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.

We check audiobooks out from the Blue Ridge Branch, or we download them through the library’s subscription to NetLibrary.

Some folks have told me that they don’t like listening to audiobooks, they like having a book in their hand.  Sitting down to read a book is a luxury some folks don’t have. So, they listen while they drive to and from work, while they are at work (if it is allowed), while they iron (personally, if it doesn’t say "machine wash, tumble dry, no iron" I don’t buy it), or while they are working in the kitchen. Audiobooks are a great way to live today’s busy lifestyle and still fit in some reading.

Annette A.
Blue Ridge Branch