My wife says I have great ears. She says our toddler also has them. I know she means the appearance of the ears rather than the skills they can perform in conjunction with the brain. I am sometimes a good listener, but other times I just say “damn, that’s crazy” after my wife tells me something completely, soberingly sane.
I long thought my “good ears” would be relegated to their striking looks. The evidence was stacking up. I feared all was lost when, years ago, I tried my first audiobook and comprehended exactly zero of it. Which book was it? I seriously don’t remember. That’s how low my comprehension was in a format I wasn’t used to.
Audiobooks fell to the sidelines. They weren’t some dragon to slay, some mountain to scale. They were simply a mission my bardic self wasn’t prepared for. Shame! For the intervening years, I stuck only to physical books and the occasional Kindle read. This story has a happy ending: I now constantly listen to audiobooks, but I had to overcome some challenges first.
Fantasy Audiobooks Broke Me
Comb through my reviews, and you’ll notice I like a big ol’ world to explore. Lots of details, deep magic systems, tons of characters with weird names, and too many apostrophes. I live for the stuff.
I tried some such books (starting with the first few Wheel of Time novels). Tracking the storylines and characters was out of the question. Everything jumbled together in my brainhole and bounced around, mixing into an amorphous blob of letters (and apostrophes, of course). Names I could normally picture on a page turned into soup the second they only existed as sound. I jumped to the hasty conclusion that audiobooks weren’t “for me.” One out of ten reading comprehension simply wouldn’t cut it, and I wasn’t about to sit through the struggle just to up my book count for the year, tempting though it was.
Crac-KING the Case
When you suddenly have to care for a baby, your reading time changes. I know some parents who can rock their baby to sleep and enjoy the cool light of a Kindle. Not me. I couldn’t pry my eyes from my daughter’s beautiful face, but I needed something to pass the occasionally long hours sitting in the dark while she slumbered. I broke my audiobook abstinence (sorry to the bible camp teachers I had in elementary school), but I deliberately chose an author who had plenty of focused, semi-grounded novels in his repertoire. Enter Stephen King!
I started with 11/22/63, and I was hooked. The story followed one character as he journeyed through history to stop the Kennedy assassination. There were sci-fi and fantasy elements, but it was one character’s narrative to track and a somewhat straightforward plot to follow. No sprawling cast, no map in the back of the book, just one guy and his impossible task. In those first months after my daughter was born, I listened whenever I had a stretch of stolen moments with her. No matter the book, I found joy in listening to it while I watched her rest in my arms.
The Two-Format Upgrade
My daughter grew, and she needed me a little less at bedtime. Those stolen moments started to shrink, and my listening time wasn’t so cut-and-dry anymore. But because I’d let the radioactive audiobook spider bite me and grant me super listening powers, I was rewired to find my moments wherever they hid.
Driving home after daycare drop-off? Taking out the trash? Walking to the local bookshop? All of these times felt like they got an upgrade. Chores became less tedious; I got to listen to my audiobook instead of just doing housework. After a long drive with “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” on repeat for my toddler’s benefit, swapping over to a narrator lulling me into a story felt like a small, well-earned mercy.
Audiobooks had found their way into my gorgeous ears in ways that hadn’t clicked before. I still read plenty of physical books, but audiobooks started filling the gaps. I expanded beyond Stephen King and started picking up the occasional nonfiction book, which, it turns out, my brain retains just fine without pictures to anchor it. I listened to books I’d heard a lot about but didn’t want to work into my physical TBR (sometimes with iffy results).
Now, I have two books going at once. When I need a physical page, I’ve got it. When I have those stolen moments, I have an audiobook. The two never cross streams or fight for the same headspace, which means I just read more. Same ears, somehow twice the bandwidth.
Always Changing
This post isn’t about whether audiobooks count as reading or how they stack up against physical books. I’m not interested in a Reddit-style debate that goes in circles. Instead, I want to highlight how audiobooks, much like physical books, changed me. I once felt the format didn’t work for my stunning ears. Then a tiny human reshaped my entire schedule, and audio walked back into my life right when I needed it, fitting into spaces I didn’t know were empty.
That, to me, is the glory of this hobby. It knows what we need and when we need it, even when we’ve already written it off. When we keep an open mind, reading finds a way to change with us. Great ears, it turns out, just needed their moment to shine. My daughter’s are shaping up to be even cuter.
