I don't read anymore.
No, seriously. I don't read anymore. I haven't read a paperback or an electronic book in roughly a year. I don't have the time. Recently, I picked up a copy of The Mountain Between Us at a book fair and have progressed about 55 pages in a month. Given my lifestyle, reading a single book takes me an embarrassing amount of months. This is unacceptable, of course. Writing and reading are desperately intertwined, and depriving myself of fiction is not a viable option if I want to continue to write. So I bit and downloaded Audible last January. It was the same old classic story: you preview a book, you use that credit to buy it and finish it, and the rest is history-you're hooked. At least I am.
Of course, I understand that this is not the same thing as reading: using your ears vs your eyes is a whole other animal when it comes to processing information. I haven't been tested on reading comprehension since taking the SATs (the second time), so naturally, I was apprehensive to give this thing a try. But, as I saw it, I had no choice: if I wanted to continue to experience fiction, I had to do something. I can't exactly manufacture a 25th hour and there are books to be read out there!
So Audible turned out to be a lifesaver. And fast! I very quickly fell in love with being read to. In character! And with accents! I spend a chunk of my day behind the wheel and it's nice to have a trained voiceover actor talk to me. Or, rather, at me.
Now, to be completely honest, I'm not sure I appreciate language to the fullest experiencing it this way, but I find that experiencing the actual plot and the story is easier for me this way. It becomes almost like a play, a movie, even. There's no visual, of course, but that's why we have imaginary casting.
Rarely without a pet-peeve, I have to admit that, sometimes, for me, the narrator does affect the story in a way that possibly wasn't intended. Sometimes accents are too put on, sometimes you can't help but think that you'd read a particular line differently. But this aspect too comes with a benefit of its own: as a writer, you never know how your words will be interpreted once they are out there in the world and this serves as an illustration of just that. Every person will literally read the same passage differently. And that's ok.
My review of "books on tape"? 4.5 stars. Depending on how you process information, and how sensitive you are to having narrators impose their voice onto something you would've potentially read differently were you actually reading, I'd highly recommend it.