As time advances and my grades climb their way even higher on my priority list, the time I am able to designate for recreational reading has been significantly reduced. In the last two years of college, I have not been able to finish a single physical novel when school is in session. Time is limited, and so is my attention span. Life keeps happening, and I have more and more things consuming my every waking thought, leaving no space to process non-assigned words on a page. Classical music helps from time to time, but oftentimes, no violin concerto banging against my eardrums is enough to drown out my thoughts, so my yearly reading goal has become beyond humiliating.

However, fret not! Last summer, in my search for strategies to expedite my course readings, I remembered audiobooks exist and decided to give them a try. I was skeptical at first, considering the paralyzing attention deficit I endure. I thought it would be hard to carry out my plans to listen to a required reading while doing other things.

I cannot live without my earbuds or headphones or music. I must be listening to something while doing the simplest of tasks. It was fun to have a break from my usual playlists and listen to Rachel McAdams read Anne of Green Gables as I did the dishes or organized my room. I finished five books in a week, which was incredibly surprising due to my Music Appreciation professor’s indomitable determination to assign an unending list of easy-yet-tedious, time-consuming discussions, reviews, and projects. As someone who is obsessed with productivity, being able to finish my course readings and recreational reading goals while completing house chores and personal tasks made me feel invincible. It also facilitated a similar and more thorough escape from everything that was going on in my life at the time. I believed audiobooks would be overwhelming, but I needed to keep myself as busy as possible, and they did just that. They also helped me get ahead on my assignments.

This is not to say that I did not occasionally struggle with accidentally zoning out while listening and cleaning. I had to rewind specific parts of some of the books I listened to more than a few times after finding myself unable to process what the narrator was saying or simply not understanding how the story had gone from point A to point B. Audiobooks are a helpful tool, not a miracle, so my mind remains destined to wander elsewhere, no matter what reading medium I use. I can admit, I do not remember much of The Chocolate War for that reason, but I remembered enough to do my weekly report just fine! As time went on and my stinginess made me more resourceful, I found several audiobooks on platforms like Spotify and YouTube that could be accessed for no additional cost! Finding a free recording of Frankenstein at a time when I knew I would have to read it, like, five times in a span of two weeks, was a blessing!

It has been so refreshing to realize how accessible reading can be. I love physical books. I treasure them so profoundly, but the voices do not rest a single second, and I am often left sitting in my room, trying to concentrate just enough for my brain to process the first sentence of the fortieth page of a book I started ten months ago, only to realize, two hours later, that I have read ten pages and do not remember who Willa is or why she is in Poland because my mind decided to play an association game after reading a familiar word on one of those pages, which reminded me of a conversation that happened ten years ago, which reminded me of something else, which reminded me of something else, etc. It is exhausting, but knowing that I can simply unlock my phone and play a book I heard my friend mention, or a classic I have been meaning to read since forever, or even a 350,000-word fanfiction I have not had time to read online, is beyond comforting. I love reading, and I hate to feel like I cannot continue to enjoy it the same because my priorities shift when I’m in school, and I cannot allow myself as much leisure as during breaks, so audiobooks have become a lifesaver. Literally and figuratively. It is exhilarating to find audiobooks for free and to be able to read while I get other things done! It soothes the voices like nothing else and helps me stay focused. 

Overall, as the reader can assume, my experience with audiobooks has been a positive one. They are a ten-out-of-ten alternative that softens the damage my ego takes for not having time to sit and read my physical books at the same pace as before, and one I would most definitely recommend.