Thanks to the recent Seattle Times article with the reminder that listening to an audio book constitutes reading a book for the purposes of Book Bingo, I was able to use some of my recent audio book “reads” to fill in a few Book Bingo squares!
For me, audio books have been a fun way to squeeze in a few more titles per month. I listen when I work out, on my way to and from work, when I’m knitting, and, when I’m really into an audio book, on my lunch breaks. I especially like listening to YA (bonus points if they have dual narrators, so fun!), romance, and some nonfiction, which is often narrated by the author, as you’ll see below. Every so often I’ll add in a literary fiction, like Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. The pleasure of truly excellent prose spoken aloud adds a depth to my experience of the story. I can’t listen to an audiobook as fast as I can read a book, so it gives me more time to think about the characters, what is happening in the plot and speculate about what might happen next. When I listened to The Dutch House (read by Tom Hanks) I was continually surprised by the twists of the plot. When I listened to Gold Diggers, I was able to step away long enough to remind myself these were fictional characters, because I thought they were making so many bad choices!