Some types of work, like driving, can be done while listening.

I read a lot more since I discovered audiobooks. It's wonderful invention and I'm happy so many books are available as audio today. A great idea to fill a time that cannot be used any other way, when walking or running (but only this, I cannot both listen and do anything else:). I usually speed up to 1.5x at least (sometimes even 2x) and in case of fiction I have to make this adjustment, because I immediately lose my focus if I'm forced to listen all those slooow lectors.

I just finished O Outro Pé da Sereia, by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto. It's untranslated to English as far as I know, which is a shame. It's a real weird book and it could spark some interesting controversy. Two stories in different times, one about locals in Mozambique's countryside circa 2002 and the other about Portuguese priests in the 16th century, which interconnect later in a surprising way. Really not worth getting into the finer detail but worth a read if you happen to get it in your language.

Each to their own.

Personally I find audiobooks are somewhat more akin to movies than the depth of regular reading, but I guess you get the basic gist of the story, and so you can claim to know it, if not as deeply as a regular reader. I feel the same way about speed reading, sure you've read the book, but you just don't take as much in, as if you had read it more slowly.

That's not to say you ever take everything in when you read a book the normal way, as your mind often goes into auto mode anyway.

However the mind is a clever marvelous thing though, and can make enough leaps to keep things quite coherent.

So like I said, each to their own, whatever you find fulfilling enough. :)

Me I don't like missing stuff, so I often re-read passages to make sure of what I am taking in ... can't do that when you have to keep pace with the narrator. I also find my mind going off in tangents at times, pondering things, which is okay when you don't need to keep up with someone.

Each has their place, but if I am gonna read, I want to do it properly, give it my full attention, so currently audiobooks are not for me ... though certainly way better than not getting around to reading at all.

Not to mention they remind me of when we had to do dictation at school ... I always struggled to keep up ... probably too easily distracted by my thoughts about what I was hearing ... no doubt requiring a focus that I cannot easily achieve.

I also read to relax, and so keeping up with a narrator feels too rushed.

But hey, if it works for you, go for it ... you don't need anyone's approval ... certainly not mine.

I find audiobooks an interesting phenomenon, especially as many are taking them up now and enjoying them, and some of them I personally know, and they were never what you could call a reader before. So they are marvelous in that regard.

One great way to make reading appeal more to the masses.

Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov

A mathematician goes to a convention in Trantor, Capital/city world of the Galactic Empire to present his new theory. The theory is psychohistory; that the future can be predicted. The Emperor hears about it and wants to use the mathematician to appease the masses. Hari refuses and is dismissed, psychohistory is just a theory. He then is scared into hiding among different sectors of the city world populated by 40 billion people.

Thank you! He still has a long recovery ahead (he was hit by a car in mid-late 2017 and then his femur prosthesis got infected and had to be removed, had two surgeries in January this year), but he's doing better now that we're back home.

Sorry you had to go through that with your mother, it's not nice having a loved one hospitalized for long periods of time. A positive thing, however, is that it becomes an opportunity to get closer; now that I have to do everything from my father (he has very limited mobility at this time, so I do everything from cleaning him to help him sit on the bed or the wheelchair) we've had more time to talk a lot, which we rarely did before.

I used to read more poetry as a teenager and on my early twenties, as I also used to write. Then I quit writing for 20 years (from 1999 to 2019) and lost interest in this art form, now that I've been into writing poetry again I've been reading again too. My main interest is still novels and short stories, though.

The History Of Middle Earth series sounds very interesting, I've only read the main books from Tolkien's world (Hobbit, LOTR and Silmarillion).

I've tried reading Dracula a few times and always end abandoning the book to read other things, I'm not sure I enjoy the epistolary format. Still, I look forward to finish it one day.

Frankenstein, on the other hand, I enjoyed quite a lot. It's very different from all the film adaptations, so it was far removed from what I was expecting. The story of how the book was conceived is also very interesting, if you can, try to get your hands on a documentary titled "Frankenstein and the Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night".

I'd like to read this series, I've never read any of Asimov's novels, just a bunch of short stories and some of his essay books, like the one about numbers (not sure what's the English title). There are a couple of the Foundation books at home, but they're really old and moldy so I've been reluctant to even open them, lol.

Very true, though I have always talked a lot with my parents, especially my dad when he was alive. Still, as you get older it does naturally happen less often and for much shorter durations, due to all sort of factors in both your life and theirs, so good to have an extended period for a change.

That said, it did get stressful at times, when I had to get on her case about eating. She has been 70kg roughly for many years, and due to a nasty bug she picked up at hospital, she lost 10kg eventually and has never put any of that back on, so is a quite thin 60kg now, which is worrying ... very little fat reserves. My mum has always been quite fit, done a lot of walking, and never been what you would call overweight. No doubt that helped a lot with the operation at her age, but it has been well over 6 months now, and she has barely resumed her walking and not put any weight back on, though seems to be eating reasonably whenever I visit or check.

She needed to force herself to eat at one point, and really struggled with that ... she stubbornly goes by feelings not logic. To be fair to her now, her body after the operation, no longer has the ability to absorb food & nutrients like it used to. In fact she needs a Vitamin B12 injection ever month, and will do for the rest of her life.

Being the oldest child, I have gotten even closer to mum since dad died over 13 years ago now. It also helps that I am retired, and can see her more .... when I can leave my hermit cave ... was a forced retirement due to my own health.

I always liked poetry, and did dabble occasionally many years ago, and moved on to lyrics when my guitar playing improved enough. It does require a certain head-space though, which I have struggled to find since being forced into retirement.

The History Of Middle Earth series is very good, if you are up to how deep it can get. Lots of descriptive stuff, especially in the proliferation of notes, plus you often get many variants of the same story, as Tolkien was forever refining things and changing elements due to new stories and trying to keep it all coherent. Highly interesting stuff though, if you can hack it. Some of it is complete stories, some prose, some are versions of both.

Of course he started most of his writings long before he got to The Hobbit and LOTR, and once they were written and published, many elements were set in concrete, so he needed to go back and adjust many of his older written works, and some things he decided to flesh out more. Some of the better stuff turned up in the published Silmarillion and other published works, but not all. Some of his revised works were unfinished or a work in progress. I still have most of The History Of Middle Earth series to read ... I'm only up to the period where he started on The Hobbit.

Old books when hard cover ones, aren't too bad most of the time, but old fragile paperbacks can be quite troublesome. Not that many of mine are moldy. If they are I probably bought them that way ... a rarity. Luckily, the Project Gutenberg etc mean I can just read an ebook variant now instead ... if I need or want to.

Personally, I prefer ebooks these days, though I read physical books regularly still. I long ago decided not to replace what I have with ebook versions ... with very few rare exceptions.

Still, because I have collected a lot of physical books over the decades, I can get a fix of nostalgia any time I wish.

Just like vinyl records. I still have plenty, but much prefer CDs or good quality files.

The worst thing, is not them falling out, but being missing. Had that a few times ... thankfully pretty rare though, and like I mentioned earlier, the Project Gutenberg etc usually provides for any real old books that have become Public Domain.

That said, new physical books also sometimes have issues ... pages missing, sometimes whole chapters, or pages out of order. Once again, thankfully rare.

I've glued a few books or pages back together. You can get specific glues or a wood based glue is often sufficient. Just run a thin bead down the edge of a page, insert in book, place a weight on top. Always pick a good safe place to leave it for a while, undisturbed.

I love most of the Conan stories, certainly those written by Robert E. Howard himself. In fact I love most of his stories. I've collected as much Conan as I can, and even read many of the non Howard ones or abridged ones partially written or modified by others. Many of those latter ones aren't so good. Some of the completely new ones by other authors are quite good, but funnily enough, even though I have them and love his other work, I have yet to read any of the Robert Jordan ones. The irony never alludes me, considering Robert Jordan would be in my top ten authors of all time.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
It takes place about 50 years after the events of Prelude to Foundation. Hari Seldon is put on trial and is exiled to Terminus along with thousands of university employees and their families. However, he is found passed away in his university office in the prequel novel. He was 81 years old. The Foundation is founded on Terminus, a poor uninhabited planet at the edge of the galaxy. Another Foundation is mentioned to be planned somewhere else. The periphery of the Galactic Empire soons breaks up.

Just finished Frankenstein and I must say that it was quite a fascinating read with so many ways to interpret the narrative, one of the main ones I noticed being to not let anger and hate consume you as it can lead to your own destruction, but again there are many ways to interpret.

Moving to The Maltese Falcon by Dasheill Hammett

The Way of Kings

This is a masterpiece of worldbuilding, proving Sanderson a grandmaster. Elements can be seen in his other works, possibly tried, experimented with, but here they all come together to create a complete world, different from what the reader would be familiar with. Philosophy, religion, ethics and, perhaps most of all, prejudice are also tackled. That requires many explanations, and they are provided, piece by piece, layer by layer, like in Shallan's drawings, each passing adding more detail, showing rather than telling. The explanations follow the action, are part of it, and even the occasional piece that would elsewhere be seen as an information dump avoids that fate here. Even the slow pace, required for such an endeavor, actually serves to emphasize the thrilling moments even more, not that I saw any risk of getting bored either way. If anything, I just wanted to spend more time reading each day, and now I'm itching to move on to Words of Radiance.
Not that The Way of Kings is perfect, of course. While Sanderson makes this work surprisingly well and the characters themselves are, usually, worth supporting and cheering for, there are too few of them for an epic fantasy on such a scale, and Kaladin is quite clearly the main focus while some of the others get too little space, which also restricts the number of locations and events that can actually be presented. And leaving Dalinar's arc completely out of part three, considering how it ended in part two, is an odd choice. But perhaps the one truly notable problem is that at times the reactions of others seem delayed, even time itself seems to stand still, to allow the arcs of the lead characters to follow a plan, including events being seen through certain eyes. And, to add an editing issue, details are hard to notice in the included sketches in the mass market paperback edition, and the handwriting is next to unreadable. But having such sketches included in such an edition at all is unusual in itself, and they do help with a few mental images even so.

Rating: 5/5

I just realized I didn't post in this year's thread :O So far I read 37 books:

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
Pamiętajcie, że byłem przeciw. Reportaże sądowe by Barbara Seidler
Skrzydła by Karolina Fedyk
Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Griesel
Opowieści z meekhanśkiego pogranicza: Północ-Południe by Robert M. Wegner
Songs of Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti
Dzisiaj narysujemy śmierć by Wojciech Tochman
The Martian by Andy Weir
Die Physiker (The Physicists) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Czarne Oceany by Jacek Dukaj
Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert
Listen by Karin Tidbeck
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Emissary (also known as The Last Children of Tokyo) by Yōko Tawada
Prawiek i inne czasy (Primeval and Other Times) by Olga Tokarczuk
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Plagi. Historia bez końca by Józef Krzyk
Król Bólu by Jacek Dukaj
Unity in Action by Joseph Hocking
Bez ograniczeń. Jak rządzi nami mózg by Jerzy Vetulani, Maria Mazurek
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (anthology, various authors)
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain by António R. Damásio
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson
Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire by James Romm
The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams
The Watcher by Charles Maclean
Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero by James Romm
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse by Otsuichi
The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Include me :)