I really like this take on audiobooks and reading in the modern world:
I feel almost constant anxiety about needing to read more, and so I end up acquiring a lot of books through various means and finishing very few of them. But often the reason I don't finish them is, as the author of the article points out, most books are very bad. I'm 33 years old and have read enough that I can tell if I'm going to enjoy a new book almost immediately after I start reading it. I never set out to stop reading a book after 10 pages, and yet I often end up doing just that, even with books I was previously excited about. And I am ruthless about putting books down whenever they start to feel like wastes of time. I wanted to read 30 books this year and have only finished a handful, but I mostly blame that on this year being an extremely chaotic one for me.
And sometimes I feel like I read for a living, staring at and manipulating text on a computer screen for 9+ hours a day. The reading I do for work is not hard; it's mostly emails and Excel spreadsheets. But all of that time spent working takes a toll on me, and by the end of the day, the last thing my brain wants to do is try to make logical sense of more letters and numbers. And I unfortunately don't have the ability to concentrate on work and listen to an audiobook at the same time, so I guess I need to set aside more time during the day when I can just listen. I am all for that, it's just a matter of finding enough books that I will actually enjoy.
But I think the important thing for most of us is to try not to feel guilty about not reading "enough". I've read plenty already, so the books I read for pleasure now should be pretty amazing. Or they should at least meet some kind of standard for making me happy or interested enough to want to know what they're all about. Anyway, I think about this a lot and still wish I could get through more books at a faster pace. But it helps my ego to try to stay realistic about my goals and what I'm likely to achieve in a given year, and I imagine a lot of people feel the same.
