If I’m being real honest, these days, I don’t have a ton of free time to sit down and read books. Yes, even though I work from home and the globe is still suffering from a pandemic in which many events/travel are canceled. I actually LISTEN to most of my adult fiction. Life is busy, but that doesn’t diminish my desire for books and stories. In fact, it often increases my desire to escape into the “pages” of someone else’s adventure. And more often than not… I do my “reading” through audiobooks. I listen while I drive, while I exercise, while I fold laundry. I’ve even started listening while I get ready in the morning… making the time-sucking tasks of washing my face, putting in contacts, straightening my hair and putting on makeup… both enjoyable and productive. But these reasons only scratch the surface of why audiobooks rock. Check out even more reasons why this modality of reading dominates my bookish experiences.

Reason #1: Audiobooks help you remember what you read.

Alright, we’re gonna start out with the academic… because I’m a teacher. Back when I was earning my Masters Degree (#ViterboUniversity) I did an action research project on audiobooks. I wanted to see if using an audiobook in conjunction to a handheld paper-page-book would increase comprehension and information retention. Spoiler alert. It did.

Here’s why. When you listen to an audiobook while you trail your finger along the text, you are engaging more areas of your brain, increasing the number of electric synapses happening, forging more memory pathways and as a result… increasing the amount the reader remembers from the text. Listening to the words as they are read aloud also does the heavy lifting when it comes to decoding (figuring out how a word sounds). Instead of thinking about how to say a word, your brain is freed up to think about what a word means or how it fits into the context of the sentence/paragraph, thus increasing the reader’s understanding (comprehension).

If you’ve got a struggling or reluctant reader on your hands, putting an audiobook into their ears, is definitely a step I’d recommend. Bonus, often times the technology that delivers the audiobook (a phone, Mp3 player, YouTube video, etc.) is exciting to the reader and further motivates the audiobook’s use and impact.

You might think these benefits only apply to kids or poor readers, but it is for these exact reasons that I listen to science fiction and fantasy books. If my word nerd brain were to have to “lift” the technical terms and theories of Andy Weir or the pronunciations of Brandon Sanderson’s characters and lands all on my own, I’m not sure I’d make it through. Audiobooks let me read books that in a paperback might be “too smart” for me.

Reason #2: Audiobooks help me battle books of beastly size, no matter my busy schedule.

Personally, I choose looooooong audiobooks. I want my $15.99 Audible credit to really count for something! For this reason, I usually listen to my adult books and “old school read” my kidlit books. Before I used audiobooks I’d have to wait until Christmas Break or summer vacation to tackle a Game of Thrones book. Now, I can dive into an epic fantasy any time I want… because I can listen every day, no matter how busy I am. I still have to drop my kids off at basketball and fold clothes and exercise (even when I don’t really feel like it) and I can listen during all of those activities. Sitting down for an hour to read each day doesn’t fit into my schedule and trying to remember multiple plot lines when you only get to read every once and a while is a challenge. Audiobooks eliminate those struggles and simply let me enjoy the story.

Reason #3: Audiobooks put you IN the story.

I love experiencing the accents and emotion expression that are served up in an audiobook. Listening to a story in this way takes everything deeper for me. Sometimes I’ll even find myself making the facial expressions of the characters because I am immersed so deeply into the story. (Am I the only one? I can’t be. Right?) Listening to a story sometimes helps me feel closer to the characters, their endeavors, resulting in stronger connections and an increased enjoyment of the story.

And, going back to that pronunciation thing I talked about in reason #1, with an audiobook, I get all the correct pronunciations of names and places so I don’t have to suffer through three books of HER-ME-OWN before I finally learn it’s HER-MY-OH-KNEE. I get the snippets of foreign languages presented in their correct form and the correct inflection and emphasis on the right syllables of made up words and places… I get the story as the author wanted it, as they designed it to be. (Especially when the author reads it themselves!)

I could go on and on about why I love audiobooks, but then I’d be taking away from your time to just go and enjoy one. Plus, I think you get it. Audiobooks rock. To close out, here are my favorite audiobooks of ALL TIME. These are in no particular order. I LOVED them all.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (adult, nerdy dystopian fiction)
The Firebird by Susanna Kearsley (adult, paranormal fiction… way cooler than it sounds)
From the Corner of the Oval by Beck Dorey Stein (adult, memoir)
The Queen of the Tearling (series) by Erika Johansen (adult, fantasy)
The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes (adult, historical fiction)
Cinder (series) by Marisa Meyer (YA, science fiction/fairy tale retellings)
When Life Gives You LuLu Lemons by Lauren Weisberger (adult, realistic fiction)
Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier (adult, science fiction)
State of Terror by Hilary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny (adult, realistic fiction/thriller)

To check out what I’ve been reading lately, check out my 2022 list!

(Also archived on this page are my 2019, 2020 and 2021 lists!)

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