People often ask me how I manage to read so many books. One reason is that I listen to audio books, which means as I drive the car, cook in the kitchen or tackle the ironing pile, I am reading while I do so. Audio books are one of the great delights of my life. If you have not yet become addicted, do give them a try. There’s a good range of books on CD at libraries, or you can sign up for audible.com and get one credit a month to buy an audio book and download it onto your Ipod, phone or Ipad. Audible has a huge range, and you can listen to a short ‘voice sample’ before buying to make sure you like the reader. See www.audible.com.au.
Some readers are superbly suited to a particular author – try listening to Timothy West reading you Trollope’s novels, and you simply experience heaven. Or Martin Jarvis reading Dickens or Just William, Prunella Scales reading Elizabeth Gaskell, Juliet Stevenson reading Jane Austen, Nadia May reading the Mapp and Lucia novels, Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter, Jonathan Cecil reading Jeeves and Wooster, Ian Carmichael reading the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, and the list goes on.
Driving the car can be a dull business, especially in the Sydney traffic, but audio books make it infinitely better – I’ve been known to stay sitting in the car to finish listening to a particularly exciting part, and I no longer dread any long journey because I have the sheer joy of audio books to make it a pleasure.
Here are some other audio book sites you may wish to browse: Booktopia, All You Can Books, and of course, Project Gutenberg has many of the classics in audio format available for free download.