Admittedly, I do a lot of reading when I am on the road - don't freak out: it's all 'Talking Books', a term I heard when I was kid. Living at home, with a grandmother a half mile up the street, who was gradually loosing eye-sight. Though she could not see well enough to enjoy books in print, she continued to read at an astonishing rate through the beneficence of the Library of Congress. The government not only supplied the recorded books, they also provided the record player for her to use to listen to all the latest best sellers. This was of course at the beginning edge of the era of cassettes that made music so portable and well before the introduction of compact discs for recording sound. Can you remember those big black vinyl platters and sound that had to be 'read' with a phonograph needle? Me neither - I'm not That Old!
So... I do a lot of reading, anything that looks interesting when I browse along the shelving at the library that has hundreds of Talking Books, mostly in boxes that are smaller than the print version. They will usually take about eight or ten hours to finish, with ten or more discs of unabridged reading. Completely eclectic topics - whatever looks good, since I have recently been surprised to discover: if it's not interesting or written to appeal to me once I get started - I'm not compelled to read something I don't enjoy. This is astounding, as I have historically read any number of books I did not enjoy... Crazy? Probably. Just never had the thought: close it, put it down, return it to the library- unread!
Some were forced upon me during my years of education, and some (one very recently I picked up when desperate for reading material) that I just needed to know how things worked out. It was a remarkably lame book, but I forced myself to finish it just to get it over with. And another I confess to skipping over two-thirds in the middle, and reading the end to assure myself that guy got safely home. Even though they were fiction, I accidentally got so involved with the characters I had to know that everything worked out at The End.
I'm reading one now about settling of Australia. I never thought much about all those English criminals that got shipped to the supposedly 'unsettled' continent when the prisons in UK were overcrowded. Then read a reference to a book that was considered a definitive story of those years. It sounded really interesting, so I requested in print from the library, found that it was a huge tome, and read twenty pages, then returned it. (After discovering a friend had a copy that I hope to 'check out' when I get ready to start it again.)
I remember my parents talking of how they enjoyed getting CDs from Cracker Barrel and listening when they would be traveling, going all over the country seeing the sights. And since I have begun to do so much traveling, going all over the country (not as far afield as parents), I have really enjoyed the books I Read While Driving. Plus the joy of learning a truly vast amount of mostly trivial information when I tune into public radio.
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