June is Audiobook Month aka why I love audiobooks

Apparently June is Audiobook Month, fancy right? Since I’m a new convert to audiobooks I thought I’d share a few that I loved as well as why I love audiobooks. My sister says “I told you so” at least once a week. I spend most of my days sewing and cutting and packing up orders. It can get boring and while I do watch hulu and netflix on my laptop I still found myself running out of distractions. That combined with my attempts to walk around the neighborhood whilst carrying a book I finally, begrudgingly decided to try it out.

I had myself convinced that my love for reading words with my eyes and hearing the voice with my mind would be a huge barrier and there was no way I could enjoy an audiobook. Boy was I wrong! My first audiobook was Divergent. I fell in love with my library paper copy and wanted to re-read it but had a stack of books waiting to be read so I hopped on amazon and with a free trial of audible I downloaded the audiobook and found myself 3 hours later with that much sewing work done because I just wanted to keep going.

Then I thought this is great for re-reading books! But there is no way I could get into a new (i.e. I’ve never read it before) book. That would be just too hard to follow I thought. So I listened to Ender’s Game and the Shadow books which I have read many times. Then I decided on a whim to download a book from my library website that get this I had never read before and would you believe it I could follow and what do you know I did enjoy it.

I love audiobooks because:

• They are great to keep me on task when I could easily be distracted. I listen to them while I sew/cut out orders/ pack orders, water the garden, do the dishes, prep dinner, and by all means exercise. They make tasks that can get mundane and monotonous enjoyable. 
• They are great to put on to trick your non-reading family members into entering whatever book world you want them to experience with you on a road trip ;)
• They are great when I want to re-read books but cannot justify the time I’m taking away from all the new books I want to read (freakishly geeky maybe but really that’s how my brain works).
• They are great to read books that I’d like to read but are lower on my priority list. If you’re like me there are some books that sounds good but you’re just not so excited to bump the books in your holds or the new releases so they may never get read. Like I read The Giver and just downloaded Inkheart, since these books fell into that category for me.
• Some books are good enough to finish but if I have to use my precious reading time where I do nothing else but curl up with a book I want it to be pretty great. I’m more willing to finish the story if I’m multitasking while being read to. Not that I haven’t abandoned an audiobook or two but it’s kinda fun to know how a book ends that I know if I were reading it I’d just give up (does that make any sense at all?)
• And last but not least the combination of a book which is greatly written and performed is like magic. There’s just an extra level that you can get if the readers are top notch and the story is already phenomenal. Not all the books will be like this but at least half of the one’s I’ve listened to have been.

 
Need Place to Start?
Here’s some audiobooks that I have both read the paper book and listened to the audio book and think the audiobook does the novel justice and maybe even adds something extra. The readers are pretty stellar for all of these.

• The Harry Potter Books
• Divergent
• The Graceling Books (the readers are so great I almost prefer listening to these)
• Ender’s Game and The Shadow books

Here are a few books that I have only listened to but really enjoyed them

• The Sweetness at the bottom of the Pie
• The Adoration of Jenna Fox
• Anna and the French Kiss
• Ready Player One

I’ve listened to many more than this if you peek at my goodreads account I note in my reviews whether I listened to them and I just created a “listened to” shelf in case any of you wanted to see.