Audiobooks equivalent to reading?

Audiobooks have become my latest favourite form of reading. Gone are those days when I used to commute for hours to go to work, or have idle mornings, or an evening tea break; all of which included a book in my hand.

As time passes by, we tend to become really busy. Being a married freelance designer now-a-days, my days are full of work and cooking and cuddling the pets. But my love for books hasn’t died. I may not have the time to read all the books I want to, but books still excite me and give me major FOMO. That’s when I found out about audiobooks. I knew about them, obviously, but I did not know if they were for me.

The very first audiobook I listened to was Harry Potter. Of course. 😀 I love Harry Potter and I love Stephen Fry. It was magical. I would listen to it all the time. While cooking, eating, bathing, working, before bed, almost all the time. And I loved it. Absolutely loved the experience. I always liked being read to, and now I did not have to ask my husband to do that for me, I had Stephen effing Fry!

I went on to listen to the whole HP series, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, Born A Crime by Trevor Noah, some Jane Austen, and Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore. They were amazing. All of them.

You know what the best part about the audiobooks were for me? I would sometimes miss the tonality of a statement while reading. The sarcasm or the jibe. But in audiobooks, it cannot get clearer and easier. Books, because they come from various places have a different cultural context to them. When Trevor Noah uses Afrikaans in his book, it is a hurdle for english readers like me. The pronunciation. How the hell does one pronounce an exclamation mark?! But in the audiobook version, Trevor himself pronounces these for you and you just go with the flow of the whole thing.

On the downside, there are so many narrators who just don’t click with you. I was heartbroken when I couldn’t listen to Michelle Obama’s narration of Becoming for more than a chapter. It felt so slow. I downloaded that book purely out of my love for the woman. And I thought I’d finish the book in a day, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t concentrate when she was reading. Such a bummer!

Another pitfall is when someone walks in on you listening to the book and starts talking over the book! Argh! It is so irritating. I have to shush them, then pause the book, then ask them to continue. And once they’re finished, go on to rewind the book and start again.

But all in all, I think audiobooks are pretty close to reading. I retained all the information a book had to give me. It’s like a friend telling you some fresh gossip or something. You remember everything. And I finished many more books that I would’ve, had I been reading the physical copies only when time permitted.

An advice for people starting with audiobooks – give yourself time. Like you pick up speed by the time you are towards the end of a book, you’ll get so much better at listening to the books. You might have to rewind many times during your first book or the first chapter of the book. But eventually, you get used to the accent, the speed and the characters, and then there’s no going back.

Do you listen to audiobooks? How’s your experience been?

The Amazing Reading Challenge: Book Bingo

We all set goals to read a certain number of books each year, and some of my more ambitious friends set one for each month. Some other like me get lost about what to read next and appreciate a challenge now and then to help us catch on reading habits. So here’s a challenge I thought would really help one read.

You must all have played bingo. Remember those 5×5 boxes with random numbers with the goal of the game was to finish one line?

So I found a book bingo on Goodreads and another one on the Penguin website. But they were not  made for the Indian audience. So I designed my own! Yay!

The rules are real simple. Let me run you through them:

1. Pick a line of five squares. It can be vertical, horizontal and/or diagonal.
2. Each book you read can fill only one square. No two squares can have the same book.
3. Tick the boxes off as you finish reading the book and you can write the name of the book as you finish, just to keep a track.
4. Celebrate your win!

Here’s the bingo for you to download and print.

Usually, this game is played in a library. But like me, you can play this with your friends. What I am currently playing with my friends is this; we have all decided to race to complete one line. And whoever completes the line first gets a book from each of the other players. Fun no? And when one line is done and one person has won, you can print a new box and start all over again. This time picking a different set of books for the same line or you can try a different line altogether. Trust me, it is going to be so much fun!

So till now, I have only completed an autobiography – Lone Fox Dancing (Ruskin Bond), which I think I will put under ‘Indian Author’ so as to complete the second last horizontal line. And am currently reading the Schindler’s List, which I think I will put under ‘Based on True Story’. But, let’s see.

This is a great opportunity to find new books to read, and explore new genres. I had never read an autobiography, but looks like I really liked it. So I will try reading more of them. And I also have ‘Open by Andre Agassi’ in my mind. The book looks promising. And them probably I will dwell into ‘A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway’.

So go on people, get reading with your book club, friends, make it a family feud or just play by yourself. The idea is to keep reading and getting to know more characters. 🙂

Happy reading.
Do tell me if you downloaded it and are playing it. Also, share your completed bingo with me.

Show me some love!

Goodreads Giveaway: Lone Fox Dancing

It was some time ago that I enrolled myself in the Goodreads giveaway for the autobiography of one of India’s most famous and loved author Ruskin Bond, Lone Fox Dancing. And I won.

As a kid, I had once had the opportunity to meet him. He paid a visit to our school. And just like the idea that our grandparents could have been young at a point in time seems comical, so does the idea of the author having a childhood. He looked old when he came to visit, about ten years ago. He looks the same ten years later. He seems to have stopped aging. Just like most of his stories. His most famous character Rusty has stayed with most kids of 90s.

I am so excited to read what he has to write. Here’s a line from the book that’s going to make you wanna know what the author’s all about. And how a person who remembers this can write such amazing short stories. And not one or two, but about 500 stories. Enough for the entire childhood.

If we are lucky, we love with both heart and body, and I like to think that my parents were lucky. Neither of them spoke of it as a courtship, however, and when I consider the short time they spent together before I was conceived, I wouldn’t call it a courtship, either. The season demanded passion, and they happened to find each other; so chance had a greater role to play in my birth than it does in others…
…
Granny’s discomfort with me may be due to the fact that she wasn’t sure if I was legitimate or not. She’d have been horrified at the thought.

Review coming soon.