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Listening To Audiobooks While You Do Something Else Is The Ultimate In Multitasking
Deborah L. Jacobs
I cover personal finance for baby boomers.
Jun 25, 2014, 01:04pm EDT |
audiobooks are a great antidote to the problem of never having enough time to read for pleasure
For those who say that listening to audiobooks isn't "reading," I heartily disagree.
As a child I spent every summer with my nose in a book. Each year I looked forward to summer library loans, which back then allowed you to keep books for several months – instead of a couple of weeks – at a time. With the help of neighborhood librarians, I would make my selections and cart home as many volumes as I could carry, delighting in their musty smell and smooth plastic protective covers. One year, when I sent my summer books ahead in my camp trunk, the counselor who unpacked it before my arrival remarked that she couldn't believe that someone who wore such small clothes could be reading such big books. At the time I thought it was an insult.
This summer I am much more likely to be listening to books than turning the pages. About a year ago I discovered that audiobooks are a great antidote to the problem of never having enough time to read for pleasure , or being too tired at the end of a day spent in front of a computer, to look at even one more word. And by listening to books while I do other things, I have reclaimed time that would otherwise be lost in today's 24/7 work world.
I can read this way on my iPhone while walking to the subway; forget my discomfort standing in the rush hour crush; plug the device into the kitchen radio during the time it takes to cook and clean up; and even slip the iPhone into a pants pocket when I'm doing other chores around the house. Suddenly I am a voracious reader again. For those who say that listening to audiobooks isn't "reading," I heartily disagree. It's simply another way of consuming them. And when a wonderful narrator reads a compelling story, it's an even richer literary experience.
Appropriately enough, I began my audiobook journey at the library -- downloading digital books from the web site of The New York Public Library using the Overdrive app. But I soon discovered two major inconveniences. Since, like hard copies, these editions are available only to one borrower at a time (for copyright reasons), I sometimes had to wait my turn to get the book I wanted. Worse yet, a digital loan lasted only two weeks, and if I didn't finish a book in that time it would become inactive on my iPhone.
Ultimately I splurged on a subscription to Audible ($14.95 per month), Amazon's audiobook marketplace. It enables me to purchase books using book credits that I accrue each month. They also send me notices of daily deals, to buy certain audiobooks at deep discount. I listen to them on my iPhone using Audible's dedicated app.
This year, instead of getting summer reading recs from the local librarian, as I did when I was a kid, I decided to crowdsource my summer list. By email I reached out to Forbes colleagues; their friends and relations; representatives from the audiobook divisions of Hachette, Macmillan, Random House and Simon & Schuster; and in some cases their customers.
"Calling all audiobook fans for a blog post about the ultimate in multitasking: Reading audiobooks while you do something else," I wrote in my all-points-bulletin. "Piketty while you paint, perhaps? Trollope on the treadmill? Gladwell while you garden?"
Abram Brown, associate editor at Forbes, was the first to oblige, with a confession that Stieg Larsson's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, narrated by Simon Vance, drove him to distraction – literally – on the long round-trip drive from Syracuse, N.Y. to Manhattan. He was about halfway through the book when he started the journey. As the story picked up, and the sleuth-cum-scribe Mikhail Blomvkist uncovered clues, "I didn't notice the time tick away," he wrote. Not until he had driven two hours in the wrong direction on the return trip, heading west at Scranton, rather than north to Syracuse, did he realize what he had done. The four-hour detour was "more than enough time to finish listening to Blomvkist unravel the whole thing."
But Susie Wilde, who has ADD, says audiobooks have the opposite effect on her. "Several years ago, I began to notice that if I tuned into an audio when I was scattered, I was able to focus and organize," says Wilde, who blogs about audiobooks at ignitingwriting.com.
My goal, in compiling the list below, was to organize summer reading recommendations around activities, matching the book with the pursuit that best accompanies it, the way a sommelier pairs wine with food. But the choices are inevitably fluid and subjective. (Most links below give you the option of listening to a sample, so you can judge for yourself.) Once you've perused the offerings, please add your suggestions in the comment space below.
Cooking. Wilde's recent favorites include Ruth Reichl's first novel, Delicious!, and where better to listen to a food writer's story than in the kitchen? The book "blends a contemporary story with mystery and just a pinch of love story," she says. "Julia Whalen's smooth reading mixes the haunting past of talented cook Billie Breslin, a packet of WWII letters that intrigue her and, of course, Reichl's delicious food descriptions." And since the book is about 13 hours long, you can accomplish a lot in the kitchen as you tune in.
Into shorter recipes? Try personal essays or books organized in segments that you can dip into and out of, even when after-dinner cleanups leave you feeling like it's been a very long day. I consumed two of Nora Ephron's essay collections, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing, exclusively while working in the kitchen. They are both narrated by the author, one of my favorities, who died in 2012. It was like having Nora back -- and with me -- in the kitchen.
Or, maybe you crave more substance to accompany the nesting and nurturing. While cooking for Passover last year, I read Tuesdays with Morrie, written and narrated by sportswriter Mitch Albom. It's a memoir about his Brandeis University professor and mentor Morrie Schwartz who is dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease. Albom visits him weekly to chronicle his declining health and enduring wisdom. Albom's impersonations of Schwartz in the audio version help us feel like we are included in the conversation.
During another cooking spree I plugged in The Last Lecture, written by former Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch after his diagnosis with terminal cancer. In the book, narrated by Erik Singer, Pausch, dispenses good life advice for his kids, who were young when he died at age 47, about everything from pursuing dreams to the lost art of thank-you notes. The format works especially well as an audiobook, but after listening to it I purchased a hard copy, thinking that I would like to reread certain sections and it would be easier to locate them in the print version.
Mindless chores. If a "honey do" list consumes so much of your weekend that by Monday you feel like you haven't had a moment of recreation, an audiobook can help you discover leisure time where you thought none existed. Long stretches spent doing laundry or ironing; walking the dog; pulling up weeds; or even in hobbies like woodworking or knitting, give you plenty of opportunity to focus on a lengthy novel.
Having recently succumbed to an Audible Daily Deal offering James Joyce's Ulysses for $5.99 (at regular price it costs $104.99, or one monthly Audible credit, which is worth $14.95), I'm committed to listening. Truth be told, I could never get into the printed version, which is more than 800 pages long. But I'm willing to give Jim Norton's narration a try. After all, it will only take me 27 hours and 21 minutes to finish it. Meanwhile, I can get a lot of other things done.
Poetically enough, Mark Decker, director of digital imaging at Forbes, happened to be listening to Bleak House as he painted, hour after hour, four different rooms of a farmhouse he and his wife had purchased. A potentially tedious task became completely absorbing, he says. Several different narrators have interpreted the story, including Simon Vance, who's been called "the gold-standard of narrators."
Janet R. Brady, a retired biology teacher who describes herself as "a compulsive audiobook listener," multitasks with books while she does practically everything – one of the few exceptions is when she's birdwatching. Last summer she revisited L.M. Montgomery's girly classic, Anne of Green Gables with her 10-year-old granddaughter, but this time as an audiobook narrated by Barbara Caruso. "She kept asking me if we needed to do more errands so we could get in the car and listen," she says. Cute.
For contemporary fiction, Brady recommends Ken Follett's books -- Hornet Flight, about a teenager in Denmark during World War II, and the first two in his 20th century trilogy -- Fall of Giants and Winter of the World (the third book in the series isn't out yet). All are narrated by John Lee.
Exercise. If the Stairmaster alone isn't enough to get your heartbeat up, you might try working out to Tana French's mysteries. Brady's picks include In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place and Broken Harbor. Other fast-paced possibilities: Runner by Patrick Lee (narrated by Raul Esparza) or Linda Castillo's new thriller, Dead Will Tell (read by Kathleen McInerney). Kashmir Hill, senior online editor at Forbes, would pair Haruki Murakami's memoir – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – with a long jog. Or take a page (metaphorically speaking) from I'm Here to Win, by triathlete, Chris McCormack, as he opens his playbook about what it takes to become a champion.
But when exercise is concerned, the proof is really in the pudding – or perhaps more precisely, on the scale. "The thinnest I ever was in New York City was the year I listened to the two, six-volume Anthony Trollope series read by David Case (aka Frederick Davison) while walking to work, says Amelia Rosner, senior vice president and creative director at FCB Health. While pounding the pavement, she has also devoured books by Nevil Shute, including A Town Like Alice, Most Secret, Requiem for a Wren and Pied Piper.
Commuting and road trips. For those stuck on public transit or behind the wheel, a good audiobook can certainly take the edge off. New York attorney Richard Stim's favorite antidotes to subway travel are Saul Bellows' New York City-based novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet, narrated by Wolfram Kandinsky and Mr. Paradise, written by Elmore Leonard, narrated by Robert Forster and set in Detroit. After a long day at the office, I found Tina Fey's Bossypants, narrated by the author, was welcome comic relief. Prefer male comics? Try Billy Crystal's new memoir, Still Foolin' 'Em, read by the author. It won several Audie Awards in May -- those are the Oscars of the audiobook industry.
Words to the wise: On long road trips, steer clear of droning narrators or potentially sleep-inducing subjects. I'm slowly absorbing Thomas Piketty's best-selling economic tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, narrated by the very professorial sounding L. J. Ganser (he has a day job as a real estate agent). But caution (and shoot me for saying this), it's a book that may induce drowsiness, so I wouldn't consume it behind the wheel. Contrast that with the effect of Brady's favorite long-trip book, Stephen King's 11-22-63, for which she offers this testimonial: "I recommended it to some friends driving to Phoenix and they had to take a detour to finish the book before they arrived."
Several of those who participated in my informal survey recommended Donna Tartt's bestselling novel, The Goldfinch – an emotion that I second. Some print-based critics have said the book is too long, but I've never heard that view expressed by anyone who read the audio version. David Pittu's rendition of the various accents – most notably that of Xandra, the throaty, dingbat girlfriend, and Boris the Russian hoodlum – are priceless. Chances are you'll move between activities with this one, too, because the book is so hard to put down.
Foreign travel. Books set in foreign locales can give you a sense of place and help you get smart before a visit. Try Donna Leon's mysteries, which vividly describe Venice; or Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, a love story set in a fictitious Spanish town (it resembles the Andalusian city of Ronda) during the Spanish Civil War. To prepare for a trip to the World War II Normandy landings this summer, I listened to Stephen Ambrose's book, D-Day, an impressive piece of scholarship drawn from letters of World War II veterans. It probably would not have held my attention nearly as well in the print version (656 pages) as it did in an audiobook, read by Jesse Boggs (25 hours and 17 minutes).
While headed to England, Marilyn Johnson, author of This Book Is Overdue! and The Dead Beat, started listening to Hillary Mantel's novel, Bring Up the Bodies, about the court of King Henry VIII. "I listened to it on the plane going over the Atlantic; while waiting in line in Heathrow; on the tube to London; on multiple buses and trains and queues; walking across Trafalgar Square to eat in the crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields," she says. "It was like experiencing England and dreaming it at the same time." The narration, by Simon Vance, "is a fabulous reading of a fabulous book." Wolf Hall, the prequel (read by Simon Slater), is equally good, she says – in fact she has listened to both twice. In lieu of the second reading, visitors to London this summer might snag tickets to the Royal Shakespeare Company production of the plays.
Sleepless nights. Whether you're suffering from jetlag or are a chronic insomniac, having someone read you to sleep is practically primordial. Attorney Richard Stim has drifted off to Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Portland, ME writer, Elizabeth Dodge, who says nighttime audiobooks are "a wonderful way to keep one's anxieties at bay at 'the hour of the wolf,'" prescribes "Nothing too complex or stimulating," no multiple cast members, and nothing with sound effects or dramatic effects.
If you don't mind regressing a bit (and after all, who will know?), you could try some of her favorite children's stories, like Michael Bond's classic, A Bear Called Paddington, narrated by Stephen Fry. Her grownup nighttime favorites: the entire Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Coyle, narrated by David Timson; Agatha Christie works, particularly Murder on the Orient Express, narrated by David Suchet; and the Kate Shugak series, written by Dana Stabenow and narrated by Marguerite Gavin. By way of introduction, "Shugak is an Alaskan Aleut who solves mysteries with her half-wolf/half-husky, Mutt (who in real life has her own fans and 'Friends of Mutt" bumper sticker')," she writes. "Not only are the books fun, but one also learns about the culture and history of Alaska, especially the delicate balance in relations between Natives and whites." Her favorite title is Though Not Dead.
Mechanics are important here. For nighttime listening, Dodge uses a Bose Wave CD player, which has a timer and, most importantly, a fade feature. But you don't have to get that fancy. The Audible app for smart phones has the same capabilities, though you may wake up disoriented, wearing earphones and wondering where you left off. No worries, says Dodge. "Those of us who fall asleep to audio often listen to parts of stories more than once, as it's usually impossible to remember exactly where one fell asleep," she notes. "Well-delivered stories are entertaining over and over again."
Under the boardwalk. Audiobooks have obvious benefits for beachgoers – there's no problem with sun glare, the pages don't curl up from humidity and you can read comfortably lying down. New beach reads include Elin Hilderbrand's novel, The Matchmaker, set in Nantucket; Emma Straub's The Vacationers, with Mallorca as the backdrop for a family drama; and E. Lockhart's We Were Liars, the story of a wealthy family's New England summer, which isn't quite as idyllic as it may seem. Or consider Alena, a new novel by Rachel Pastan, about a young curator at a Cape Cod museum who gets caught in the mystery of her predecessor's disappearance -- reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca. "I suppose it could be fun to wander a museum listening to an art novel," says Forbes reporter Samatha Sharf. But she hastens to add, "I know the author, her day job is as staff writer at a contemporary art museum, so she probably wouldn't be a fan of that sort of multitasking."
As one who's reached some major life decisions at the water's edge, I can make the case for beach reading that expands our horizons. One of the most inspiring books I've read this year was My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor. As a Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor can't discuss the cases she hears on the bench. But this intimate memoir reveals all the obstacles she overcame to get there. She's the daughter of immigrant parents, whose alcoholic father died young, and has lived with diabetes most of her life. Wit, wisdom and perseverance helped her succeed in a world long dominated by wealthy white men. Not just for legal eagles, this book will inspire, entertain and motivate. In the audiobook, Rita Moreno is extremely well cast as narrator.
More recently, I listened to Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, a heart-wrenching tale which among other things shows that you don't need to have a perfect childhood to grow up to be enormously successful. The book ends with Obama being elected senator and clearly on his way to bigger and better things. The timing may seem odd, with him so overwhelmed by the job of President right now, and uncertain about his legacy. But both his writing and his narration are exquisite. Let's hope he will make more of these talents after he leaves the Oval Office.
What audiobooks are you reading this summer or do you recommend? Please add them to the comments below. I'll compile them in a future post.
Archive of Forbes Articles By Deborah Jacobs
Deborah L. Jacobs, a lawyer and journalist, is the author of Estate Planning Smarts: A Practical, User-Friendly, Action-Oriented Guide, now available in the third edition.