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WARNING: Some bad words might be used in the following post. Don't say I didn't warn you!
Hello my lovely bookish friends! Here we are, with my very first discussion post of 2019, and I'm talking about Audiobooks, how I discovered them, and why I now love them. Let's dive right into it.
How I Fell In Love With Audiobooks
Every year I try to try something new in my reading, and last year it was the the year of the audiobook. If you've been here for a while, you might have heard me saying that I had a hard time enjoying audiobooks. At the time I tried a few but they were never my cup of tea. I tried a few times over the years, until I found the perfect audiobook for me. It was Originally Human by Eileen Wilks, from GraphicAudio. That started my road to becoming a fan of audiobooks. The great thing about that audiobook is that it had a full cast, and background and ambient sounds, so it was, much like the tagline for the company says, like a movie inside my head.
Then at one point I went ahead and decided to listen to the Welcome To Night Vale podcast while I was doing some chores around the house. This was early last fall. I wasn't yet convinced, but a podcast sounds more like a radio play, and I've mentioned quite a few times I enjoy radio plays, especially old ones, much more than audiobooks. Although it took me a while to get used to the uniqueness and, dare I say, strangeness of Night Vale, I kept coming back to it because of the narrator, Cecil Baldwin, and the weather segment, which I adore. And then....something magical happened.
I'm not sure where I first heard about the Read Me Romance podcast. I think it was thanks to Teresa from Romance Reader that mentioned it in one of her stories on instagram before it went live though. The idea of this podcast was amazing: one free audiobook that you could listen in episodes all throughout the week. Who would say no to that? Anyway, I started listening to the podcast, and at first it was the strangest experience ever, because I'm used to reading erotic romance, but never listening to it. So it took a while for me to get used to the idea of having a rather explicit story told to me, but once I started getting used to the audio format, I started to want more and more books to listen to. It helped that author Tessa Bailey and the Alexa Riley author duo, the three lovely ladies behind this podcast, are such amazing sweethearts, and they break up the novellas in 5 episodes, and it doesn't feel so overwhelming. Also I love listening to their convos, they're hilarious and so relatable. Plus, they give us tiny peaks into the life of an author, the hardships, the fun times, but also they just talk about the day-to-day life, which is fun to listen to. Which brings me to me today.
Right now I'm in the middle of a full-length audiobook and I'm having so much fun listening to it. The story is awesome, and even though there's only one narrator, I'm really enjoying it. Plus the narrator is doing such a great job, that sometimes I don't even notice there's just one person talking.
I do still have a little bit of issue with how slow the narration is. I still think that I can read some of these books a little bit faster on paper or on a screen, than listening to it, and I can't say I'm a fan of turning up the speed, so the workaround I found was by doing stuff while listening. I either do stuff around the house, or I play a video game, or even work on my knitting projects.
I still think it all depends on the narrator. For me that's still very important and I don't think that I will ever be able to focus on the story even though I don't like the narrator. That being said, I will try.
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Now I have to figure out what format am I missing when it comes to storytelling. Maybe mangas?
Let's talk. Do you like audiobooks? Which one is your favorite? Do you have a favorite narrator maybe? Let me know, so I can check them out.
