I highly recommend audio books.
I tallied it up and last year I read 58 books averaging 1.8 hours of reading a day.
It's great!
I tallied it up and last year I read 58 books averaging 1.8 hours of reading a day.
It's great!
A good book is something you want to take slowly and really read. Digging in and unpacking the meaning from interesting turns of phrase. I just don't get that from listening. I need to see the words.
Maybe for history, textbooks, or mindless pageturners it could be useful. But for a capital-B Book, no, that doesn't do it for me.
Early literature was all based on rote learning and spoken tongue. We still have some of those works left from preliterate times. Socrates, Homer, etc. Although, 'pre-literate' literature does sound a bit self contradicting.
As to early literature, I just got done reading Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey. she goes into that a little in the introduction, about the difference between something you recite and something you read, and about how the odyssey is sort of in-between those two things; clearly it wasn't just homer taking dictation, but it also clearly does contain some artifacts unique to an oral storytelling tradition.
As an aside I highly recommend reading "How to Read a Book". I don't recommend studying every detail, there is a lot in there I don't think is particularly valuable, but some of it really shifted how I thought about and approached reading.
However, for the right books, audiobooks can be even better in my experience; books where you want some "wisdom" and feelings more than concrete stuff, and where a peaceful, somewhat-slow is appropriate.
I listened to Lab Girl, an intimate autobiography, read by the author, and it was fantastic. I am now going over a book on buddhism, and because I don't really care about remembering the details of Maharana's life, I love listening instead of reading. With such a book, reading faster doesn't seem to make much sense, I wanna go slow and savior its lessons.
In any case, it's been a good complement to my traditional reading; even when it isn't the best way to read a book, it's a fantastic way to make the most of commuting or doing chores.
I didn't find it that hard to listen to Dune compared to listening to, say, Peter F. Hamilton's works. For me it all is something that becomes entirely attention consuming.
Your mileage may vary!