Audiobooks

I started truly enjoying reading probably in grade 6 or 7. I really got into the Twilight Saga, my mom used to say “If I could meet any author in the world it would be Stephanie Meyer to thank her for getting so many young girls to become book lovers. Especially my daughter.” Since I started reading I’ve only ever read physical books. I didn’t prefer hardcover over paperback or vice versa (although if I loved a book I wanted it in hardcover cause it looked pretty) I just wanted the physical copy. My parents tried giving me a kindle so I would stop filling my suitcase up with books every time we went away, but it just wasn’t my style, and I found it hard to get into a book without the physical copy. Now that time has passed I read it all, paperback, hardcover, eBooks, and now even audiobooks (which wasn’t even a consideration when I was growing up).

My very first time trying an audiobook was for a novella (a short in between book to a series) by Holly Black. She wrote a novella for her Cruel Prince series called The Lost Sisters. This book is actually only available as an audiobook which is why I had to read it that way. I was just coming off the high of reading the second book in the series Wicked King and the third was a year away from being released and I needed more from this universe.

Now despite my mind not changing about my opinions of Jude’s sister, and not exactly caring for the novella itself, I did appreciate the audiobook and the narrator. I thought it was so clever to have it as an audiobook since the novella is Jude’s sister telling a story. I truly felt like I was listening to this particular character telling me a story. I was responding back to it as if it was a conversation (which sounds a lot more crazy than intended).

So, I really enjoyed that one. A few months after that my best friend and I signed up for library cards and we realized there’s a whole world of eBooks and audiobooks for free that we are not using to our advantage. That’s when we decided to listen to the book Siren by Kiera Cass. It was a stand alone book, so if we didn’t like it it was okay we didn’t have more books to read/listen to.

The way the narrator uses her voice in this audiobook sucked me in. I was listening to it all the time. About half way through the book I was ready to up the speed and I find the more books you listen to the faster you can listen to them. Sometimes my husband will laugh at me because he can’t understand a word the book is saying and I realize I have the speed over 2.15. After I finished that book I thought it was so good I would try another audiobook. However, the next book I wasn’t really into, and there was so much information thrown at me that I needed to switch over to the actual book so I could stare at the words. Then I gave up on audiobooks for about a year.

In that year we had some pretty crazy things happen, a world wide lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and my husband and I found out we were expecting a little baby. It was during lockdown I decided I wanted to try audiobooks again. I got a few free books because of a promotion going on with Audible and I got Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas. This was my first SJM book I couldn’t get into. I was so disappointed, but also determined to love it. I started listening to it while building furniture from Ikea one night, and then it was listening to it while I tried a bunch of new stuff during lockdown like recipes, yoga, gardening, stretching because of pregnancy. I was always listening to it. I finally finished the book and it was because I was able to listen to it.

Now I listen to audiobooks all the time. A good chunk of my reading list last year was audiobooks. I feel I have come so far from only reading physical books to reading all types of books and appreciating them all. I think everyone should give audiobooks a try, you might like them more than you think! Here is a small list of some of my favourite audiobooks:

The Lost Sisters by Holly Black

Siren by Kiera Cass

Storm and Fury by Jennifer L. Armentrout

The Lux series by Jennifer L. Armentrout

The Serpent and Dove series by Shelby Mahurin

Crescent City series by Sarah J. Maas