Audiobooks is the only approach that worked for me. Listen when I commute, when I shop for groceries, when I do household chores. It's a pretty fragmented way to get through a book, but with a busy lifestyle, it's better than nothing! Been doing that for years.
Edit: I should add that another optimization I got into this year has been to slowly ramp up the audio speed, which allows me to cover more content, albeit with some hit to comprehension, depending on book type. Currently listening to a non-fiction book at 1.6x.
That's kind of like saying, "people who are parents, how do you find time to have fun?"
It is overwhelming, particularly at first, but after a while you figure out is a marathon, not a sprint, and that an important part of being a good parent is self-care. Then it's just a matter of what constitutes self-care for you. Getting good sleep, eating healthy, getting exercise, socializing with friends, watching movies, having date night, and yes, reading books are just some of the activities that might be considered self-care. You figure put how much time you need to allocate to self-care to be a functional parent, and then you figure out how to carve it the time. All of that is hard a heck, but you figure it out eventually or you fail miserably at patenting.
In that context, reading books isn't much of a miracle or particularly impressive; it's just a choice of what works best for you.
> an important part of being a good parent is self-care
Kids (also) learn by example, by imitating their parents doing their own things. So, not only self care, but also your things. Obviously, common sense, a toddler requires more attention than a teenager, won’t read nor play piano right away. Some things, like playing music, cooking (and for whatever reason, vacuuming) seems to have early impact :)
The other way I have heard the same idea, but phrased with slightly different motivation:
Your children are important part of your life, and you are important part of their life (especially in the early years). This has also an implication: Who actually is this person they get to know?
I don't have kids, but coincidentally discussed these kind of childhood memories with my spouse quite recently after someone made similar complaint. I probably hsve no idea of time commitments required of very small children. However, about at the age we were old enough not to be disruptive (if supplied with reading material when necessary), both our parents took us to their adult things: bird watcher society meetings, social events, art museums, bookshops, and seminars. It is probable our parents did their peronal own things less than they would have if we had not existed, but we agreed we did not suffer from it, and learned quite a deal.
There is anyway the peculiar something about way kids' experience thing and what of them remain when we grow anyway. Undoubtledly I have learned things much useful I don't remember much about, like how to walk. For me, the images I can call up are the odd, random, small ones. To a child many things are novel in this world, and one knows there is lots of things in adults' world to uncover. Yet because of that lack of perspective, various things may be treated as the normal. As an added complication, one's perspective on childhood memories changes and gains different color when one grows up.
Once, while visiting relatives on a road-trip, tthere was half a day long detour to see an exhibition of non-figurative sculptures whose details I don't recall. I do remember the calm, cool, air-conditioned atmosphere, the white bright walls, the smell of the museum, and the impression of uncanny puzzlement and imcomprehension left by the lone melancholy video installation in a small, separate darkened room in one of the exhibition halls. I was about 12 years old and quite bored. I surmise I was brought along mostly because father wanted to go, maybe because he wanted to give me educational experience about modern art, but most certainly there was any no other option suitable for preteen's inclinations given the circumstances of road trip, and as I said, he wanted to go. Nevertheless, despite the boredom, today the memory certainly is far more interesting than what I recall of the most of the kid-oriented activities I liked then better and also took lot of my parents' time.
It is difficult for me to judge the value of that museum experience -- is it because of the exhibition was remarkable or does it feel remarkable because I remember it? It might even be a partially constructed memory from several similar museum trips. And after all, the thing I remember especially well, much better and concretely than anything else, one of my earliest childhood memories (that I have photographied evidence of), is something utterly mundane, namely the large, black, late 80s mat we had on the living room. In retrospect, it was horrendously ugly on its own right as soon as the TRON aesthetic went out of style, but the reason I remember it was that it had this repeating, neon-colored rectangle pattern, rows and columns, one symmetrically after other. To my eternal dislike, the pattern repeated regularly until it did not: the final row of rectangles at one end were shorter than they should have been given the rest of the pattern. No matter how I counted or measured or tried to mentally rotate the damned thing in my head, there was no solution, no escape, the thing was always asymmetrical. (I amuse myself thinking this may have something to do with me deciding to study math and CS in university later.) Thus one of possibly life-defining experiences was the rug my parents bought years before I was born, and presumably thrown away while I was in primary school (it disappeared and I never inquired about it).
Of childrens' fiction authors, I think ones such as Roald Dahl, Dickens, Lemony Snicket, maybe Rowling (the very first chapters of Philosopher's Stone) capture something of this aspect to watching the world unfold.
I’ve tried many times. Just can’t focus on the audio. I’ll start thinking about something and the next thing I know 20 minutes will have passed without hearing a word.
Try starting with something suspense based that does not have convoluted writing and really grabs your attention, like a Dan Brown book or Harry Potter (read by Stephen Fry). Also, go for the professional readings (i.e. not most of Librivox) and pay careful attention to what reviews say about the reader, as their performance is essential for comprehension. Play around with listening speed a bit (both too slow and too fast won’t work, depending on the material). I could easily increase material complexity after getting through suspense-based books.
I could not get into audiobooks (even after years of listening to scientific talk podcasts) until I got hold of Origin by Dan Brown in an Audible trial, and ended up being gripped by the 20 hour book for two weeks straight. It has been 15+ audiobooks from various sources per year for me since then, which has really enriched my life. Retention is better since I finish the books that can be integrated with various activities not requiring verbal thinking way faster.
Another trick is to start with podcasts. I still remember stumbling upon hardcore history podcast. It was so good that I just walked hours randomly listening to the series on Mongols.
Generally podcasts are lighter than books. And generally fiction books are lighter than non fiction.
I have the exact same issue. If it’s video, my eyes (and brain) are occupied and not easily distracted. But audio alone, unless it’s like radio where you don’t care if you miss something, has been difficult to keep attention on.
Unlike eBooks, where you can easily go back by scanning with your eyes, audiobooks can only provide you a way to quickly go back in time, not context (unless the context is directly related to time, like rewinding for 10 or 20 seconds, for example).
I’ve been thinking of listening to audiobooks while doing chores and not bothering about missing some words or sentences. But I’d have to choose a casual work so that I don’t regret missing anything.
Listening to audiobooks while riding a bicycle worked well for me. Driving, walking and any other physical activity that can be done in "zombie mode" works well with audiobooks, radio.
Now I'm prone to tuning out the stream of text the same way I (and presumably brightball) tune out the stream of speech from an audiobook. If I want to be sure not to miss something, I need to read aloud. :(
I am shocked to find out that no one in in this thread mentioned Scribd.
Scribd is the go to place for audiobooks, it is the only major subscription service I regularly pay.
Audible is horrible, their business model sucks, and what sucks even more is their scummy marketing.
Scribd is basically the Netflix for books, and I honestly love it and cannot recommend it enough.
I do think it has way more potential to become something if it integrated with other services even better, but I guess working with publishers is not easy...
That’s exactly what I do. And, I realized that it makes a huge difference if you buy both audio and the eBook. I love Amazon’s whispersync functionality, because it allows me to switch back and forth between audio and text. So whenever I hear something I don’t understand I read it instead.
After a spine surgery, Audio books became the de-facto medium for books for me and I really appreciate the accessibility it provides.
Btw, Audio books for accessibility reasons are not new, 'Talking Books' have been in existence since 1930s through specialized record players, cassettes and mail-order libraries. Here is a nice video about[1] from TechMoan and article[2] at RNIB.
I don't even have kids yet and I'm also only able to complete books via sped-up audiobooks. It's a really great way to get through them.
For fiction, go for something with a professional narrator. Jim Dale's Harry Potter series is a good example. They can make it into a modern-day radio drama. But for non-fiction, I prefer if the author reads it. Authors imbibe an excitement to the reading of non-fiction; professionals often come across as monotone and I can't focus on them.
Aside, Audible is pretty scummy. Consider a less scummy alternative like Libro.fm.
- Audible's "Cancel membership" flow is multiple pages long and makes you think you've canceled it when you actually have to keep progressing through additional "I want to cancel" clicks. I thought I canceled the free trial when I hadn't. When complaining to some friends of mine, they also made the same mistake.
- When you finally cancel your membership, you've only put in a request to cancel it. The actual cancellation will happen in 30 days. This means you're always billed one more time after cancellation (I couldn't believe this when I saw it).
- When your membership is finally canceled, you lose all of your tokens (you get one per month). So if you have 5 tokens saved up and you want to pause your membership for a couple months because your bank balance is low, too bad. (Note: I've since realized that Audible lets you pause your membership once per year for 1-3 months, but this is an unsatisfying solution and I only discovered it in their support forum. I didn't even see the option while canceling twice.)
- Because canceling your membership has a 30-day delay that charges you once more, you're basically buying one last token that's going to get immediately deleted. This means that if you're billed on the 1st of the month but you cancel (ahem, submit a cancel request) on the 2nd of the month, 29 days later you're going to be charged one last time and receive a token that is deleted within 24 hours.
I haven't used Libro.fm yet (have a sour taste in my mouth from Audible), but their tokens never expire and canceling ("pausing", in their language) membership doesn't delete tokens.
I want to write a blog post that makes these points more eloquently, with evidence, but I haven't had the energy.
"Wait, what if we charge people once more when they try to cancel our service?" is one of the most ridiculous experiences I've ever had. Even worse than that one time I had to cancel a cam-site subscription by uncommenting-out the <button>Cancel</button> in the html.
The world is only as good as the things we choose to tolerate.
Even if you are happy with Audible it is worth trying to cancel every few months because it is highly likely they will offer you a substantial discount every time.
Thank you. I find audible difficult to navigate. I have been meaning to cancel but I gave up. I am waiting for a book I really need that’s a good deal. Collecting credits till then. I do like their free meditation snippets tho’
Audible's business decision to revoke credits on membership cancellation is one of those decisions that makes me wonder if they're actually leaving money on the table. Like, wouldn't having unspent credits in your account contribute to membership reactivations down the road? And enable marketing emails like "Don't you want to spend your 3 credits?"
When you finally cancel your membership, you've only put in a request to cancel it. The actual cancellation will happen in 30 days. This means you're always billed one more time after cancellation
- Oct 25th: Copy and pasted from their email, "We’re just confirming that you’ve cancelled your Audible membership. You’ll continue to have access to your credits until November 25, 2020."
- Nov 4th: I'm charged once more and receive a token.
- Nov 25th: I finally lose tokens and my membership transitions to the canceled state. I'm never charged again.
I've run this experiment a second time when my girlfriend canceled last month (I also wanted screenshots of the cancelation wizard for the blog post I want to write). She was charged once more between the "cancel request", the rebill date, and the actual cancel 30 days later.
What do you think is a more accurate, charitable description of these events? I think "cancelation has a 30-day delay" summarizes the post-cancel rebill much more charitably than it deserves.
I have one. It's well worth it. I've listened to more than 200 books in the last two years in my spare time. It's a skill that takes time but I absorb books just as well now via listening.
tts programs have also gotten much better over the last 5 years or so, entirely adequate for most technical reading/articles/non fiction. it's an imperfect solution but it does reopen the doors to a vast swathe of writings that will likely never be worthwhile for a human to narrate.
Edit: I should add that another optimization I got into this year has been to slowly ramp up the audio speed, which allows me to cover more content, albeit with some hit to comprehension, depending on book type. Currently listening to a non-fiction book at 1.6x.