April was another very slow month for reading. I spent way too much time doom-scrolling and feeling horrible about the state of the world. The best decision I made all month was re-reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That book is a classic, and was exactly what I needed to improve my mood.
March is the month when the Coronavirus pandemic became real for the United States. Even before California locked down on March 19th, I was finishing books at a slower rate, and I didn’t finish anything in the latter half of the month.
I’ve had a version of this post sitting in my drafts for months as I write this intro in August. Originally I was just being lazy, but come March, we all know what happened. After the LA stay-at-home order on March 13th, my reading slowed to a crawl for a number of reasons. I couldn’t focus on books, I wasn’t listening to audiobooks during my commute, and I was spending way too much time doom-scrolling on Twitter.
Shortly after I posted my glowing, enthusiastic review of Scribd’s service (especially its audiobook selection), they decided to blow up their entire business model and the app went swiftly downhill.
People keep trying to make “Netflix for books” happen. It’s probably because someone out there thinks I don’t have enough to read. I was definitely skeptical about these services at first because I have always been perfectly happy getting too many books from my local library. However, once they started introducing options that included audiobooks and comic books, it wasn’t long before I gave a few of the all-you-can-read services a spin. Luckily, most of them offer a free trial month, so it was easy for me to get sucked in.
