2012-2013, My Audiobook Year

Today is the first day of We’re Listening: Audiobook Week 2013. Hosted for the fourth year by Jen at Devourer of Books, Audiobook Week runs June 17–21. It’s a fun way to find audiobook reviewers and see what everyone’s listening to. Click here to see other posts on today’s topic, My Audiobook Year.

Are you new to audiobooks in the last year? Have you been listening to them forever but discovered something new this year? Favorite titles? New times/places to listen? This is your chance to introduce yourself and your general listening experience.

I’m an old fan of audiobooks for listening to in the car and around the house, but as the books I wanted to listen to became harder to find on cassette tape and I was facing a transition to CDs, my audio addiction started to seem like a problem. Where it had been so easy to pop a tape out from my old car’s tape player and pop it into the one in the kitchen, now I had to have one audiobook on tape for the car and listen to a different one on the CD player inside. CDs don’t save your place for you like cassette tapes did, and I was spending way too much time fiddling around or writing notes on where I had left off.

I wrote about this last year, too, but the truly inspired gift of an iPod Touch from my husband made listening to audiobooks so convenient! How could I not have one going pretty much whenever I was alone even for just a few minutes? But the earbuds were kind of a pain. This year, my latest audiobook-enabling device is another inspired gift from my husband – one of those Jabra Bluetooth headsets that clip on over one ear. (You may still hear a couple of Borg jokes even though these have been around for a while, but the convenience of these babies makes it worth it.) No more dangling earbud cords to catch on things. No more having to switch from car stereo to earbuds. Much more multitasking!

One downside about audiobook listening becoming easier and easier is that I only write, on average, I’m guessing, one review for every six audiobooks I listen to. I start the next one right away and never get around to reviewing the last one.

Briefly, then, here are just a couple of my favorites since last Audiobook Week:

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Read by the author
Penguin Audio
Sept., 2012
9781611761108
5 hours on 5 CDs

The author reads This Is How You Lose Her, a collection of linked stories related to failed relationships, so every inflection or stress is how he hears the sentences in his head. This literary authenticity and the author’s clear, comfortable familiarity with his own words more than justifies not having a professional audiobook narrator do this one.

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian
Read by Alison Fraser and Mark Bramhall
Random House Audio, 2011
978-0-307-94077-3

This creepy story of an airline pilot traumatized by a plane crash moving with his wife and young twin daughters to a house in rural New Hampshire would make a good book club choice for October. The dual narration is great, switching between the perspectives of husband and wife.

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