I am a girl who deeply enjoys reading. Obviously, I started out with kids books and moved on to comics, then teenage literature and drama, slowly on to sci-fi and fantasy. Now I am mostly reading anything that seems compelling, from biography to sci-fi.
I’ll tell more about specific books in another post because right now I wish to tell about the magical key to growing, that I got from former dear friends’ dad. I lived with another awesome family for a few months and I have known them for most of my life. I learned many interesting things from them, but the one I’ll talk about is audiobooks – this is what changed my life in a good way.
When I was a kid, I read at home, I didn’t usually carry books to places, only when I went to visit my aunt for a few weeks. I remember nights and days spent reading, was it comics or storybooks. I remember our father telling nighttime stories and I remember our mother reading kids nighttime stories before sleep or while sleeping. Plus a great memory I have is going to the library. It was like the list of “what to read” was endless and never stopped growing.
When I was a teenager I still read a lot compared to the people I spend time with. Summers when all the friends were gone traveling and tripping or when I was grounded. I stayed at home with my sister and read for victory. I had a long list of to reads and have read. I read over 3 books a month and they were not just 20 pages or not even just 100 pages, they were fat delicious books. I started from lunch and read until 3am at night doing food breaks. It was finally a struggle to find a pose that didn’t hurt to read in, but that didn’t stop me and my sister. I also went a lot to the city to visit my mom at work which meant me sitting in a bookshop for hours reading a book until I finished it.
The older I got the less time I suddenly had. The truth is that it was actually a computer that made time fly. So for years, I surfed the internet while books were just collecting dust. It was for around 2,5 year that I didn’t pick up a book. Then I moved to Malta and met Joanna, another sweet person that will stay in my heart forever. She read books and wanted to read more, so we both started the – always carry a book with you. We went to a bookstore, I bought “Green Mile” and carried it around for 5 other months wherever I went. I didn’t finish it, I had like 20 more pages. I had to move so I didn’t just want to throw away the book, I took it back to the place I bought it. It was a sweet bookstore that a woman had built up on her own, we even talked with her and she said: “it was my biggest dream, to have a bookstore of my own”. It was closed the day I wanted to give back the books I bought and thank her. So I left the books behind her shop door, on a tiny wall next to the door and at night when I walked back home I saw that she had put them up to sell again. It was so heartwarming for me to see that another person will get a chance to live through the story I just lived.
So the Green Mile book I had, was not thin and that was the first time I had experienced the weight of a book. It was really disturbing, but I handled it.
Moving to Norway and living with the family, I got supertired of sitting on the computer which made me take a step towards who I am today. I got another book and I didn’t read it because I could not focus on a book for longer than 5 minutes.
Kids and grown-ups, that is what a computer and all that noise around you will do to you. You actually will lose the ability to focus on one thing. You get used to doing all those things at the same time, having noise around, always checking something, thinking something, planning something, remembering something. We forget to breathe in that mess that nowadays life has turned into. It scared me enough to start actually seeing what I let into my life and what I choose not to let. I wanted to get back that focus, to turn myself off from the virtual world. But a book on a paper didn’t help and I didn’t know what to do until I talked with the father mentioned before and he gave me super duper advice. AUDIOBOOKS.
I started to build my focus with the audiobooks. I sat down in a living room, watched sunsets or a fireplace and listened, got lost in it. It worked. I saw how much less I got from a computer and how much more a book gives, be it audio or paper. I finished my first audiobook “The Story of Anne Frank”.
I moved to Estonia and I continued practicing audiobooks. I got a job at a clothing store, which gave 30+30 minute breaks on point in 12-hour workdays. That was all I had, but I read around 5 books just while working in 4 months. 40 minutes a day, I listened to an audiobook and I finished books. Which would have never happened when I would have had a book with pages because I had to fast-eat at the same time.
I started with my first paper-book at the beginning of summer again because they didn’t have an audiobook for it that would have been suitable for me. Yes, you really have to listen if the voice speaking is the voice that makes you want to listen, all books don’t have the style of reading or voice that would suit you. I got a new job which has humanly breaks for eating with a normal tempo and actually doing it as long as a person needs for eating.
It was my favorite book series and I read around 2000 pages once again just by taking the book with me everywhere I went and mostly reading it at work while eating. The fat juicy book of 600 pages, made my bag always too full and too heavy, but this time I HAD TO HAVE IT. Even if in one day I read just 3 pages I was happy. I read 4 fat books, it took me 9 months. If I would have taken it seriously, it would have gone faster, but I did it as I wanted to. Plus sometimes I listened to some other audiobooks to take a break from the sci-fi events.
I listened to audiobooks while I was walking home, while I was taking the bus to work or bus back home (works ideally for people who want to read while taking a bus, but get nauseous looking down not out of the window). I listened while cleaning at home and sometimes before bed, just eyes closed 15 minutes and fell asleep.
In the middle of carrying a fat book and listening to audiobooks, I also started to desire the e-reader. (Two of my favorite desires made clear why they are super good.) Which doesn’t cost anything in 2 years plan, but I haven’t gotten the strength to go and actually buy myself something so life-changing. I will at some point have it because I do like traveling, but I’d hate to leave a fat tasty book behind.
I am not a person who says that books HAVE to be on a paper otherwise it’s not reading. Have people even tried to finish a book that you can listen, or read an online book scrolling to the last actual page? I know that turning that last page is a sweet-sad-victorious moment of reading a book, but you know what else is? Seeing that you have 12-hours of an audiobook to listen and to finally get to the final 10 minutes. To see that scrolling has brought you to the end of the scrolling and that was actually smart-scrolling not that noise-scrolling. And whatsoever, reading is anyway about the story not about last pages, minutes or scrolls. Reading is about chapters and series. If something doesn’t suit you, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad and not real. I, for example, wish to use all these reading ways to just make my life easier. Different situations need different approaches.
So if you see yourself as a type-Matu – someone who wants to read, but is too lazy to get started, can’t find focus or something similar whatever reason. Try audiobooks – go find one book that you are pretty sure you would enjoy and then find an audiobook online. There are “torrent” pages, there are “buy” pages, there are “free” pages.
There are free apps for phones to listen to audiobooks comfortably.
Why I recommend to try audiobooks?
- See the hours passing doing something useful, also you WILL get through the book faster if you want to grow your “have read” list.
- Improve hearing memory
- Improve language skills in listening to an actual person and also pronunciation
- Improve focus slowly, have control over your surroundings, but choose to be quiet and listening to the story. Some books have an actual book author reading it. For example – Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between) by Lauren Graham
You can do something at the same time due to your free hands and eyes – eat, clean, walk, relax, cook etc. Some people even listen to audiobooks in cars instead of radio noise.
Helps you fall asleep if one struggles with putting phones away and actually relaxing. You put on a timer turn off lights, close eyes and just listen. Works like magic.
It weighs nothing, you just have to have a device to play it on (phone, computer, speakers, radio and at least one is mostly every time with us etc).
You can’t spill coffee on and ruin it.
With a busy lifestyle you start to actually see how much wasted minutes there are where we could actually learn/enjoy/relax and audiobooks definitely teach it to find time in places and doings you never thought you could make useful.
