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.
The ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood has a miniature bookstore in their lobby curated by One Grand Books. They ask actors, artists, writers and other creatives to pick their ten “desert island reads” and explain their choices. Browsing through these selections is a great way to kill time while you wait for your movie to start. Some … Read more
I read a lot of books in 2017, but most of them were graphic novels. That does feel a bit like cheating, but I made up for it by reading them in high volumes and by tackling a few massive books over the course of the year. My totals for 2017 were as follows: 111 … Read more
I love reading Best Of the Year lists even if I don’t always agree with what they’ve picked. After all, a really great list might introduce me to some awesome book, album or movie that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Even a list full of willfully contrarian selections has some entertainment value. The worst thing … Read more
Over at Mashable, MJ Franklin declares that he is “a millennial, and (he) will never give up reading real books“. If you were wondering, he defines “real books” as the paper-and-glue sort, not those filthy ones-and-zeroes people keep locked up in their e-readers. Audiobooks don’t even enter the discussion, so his post is already inadequate … Read more
I recently started listening to H is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald. The book is a rare experience, both because I don’t read many non-fiction books and because the author is a fantastic narrator. Her recitation is both deeply personal and carefully, perfectly enunciated in the exact sort of British accent that makes for a pleasant listening … Read more
We’ve been watching the Starz adaptation of Outlander recently, and it got me thinking about how I’ve never actually read a “romance” novel, but I’ve read plenty of stealth romance sold as other genres. I’ve actually owned Outlander on Kindle for a while – it was free at one point and I thought I might as well find out what all of the fuss was about – but I never actually got around to reading it.
Overcast is one of the best podcasting apps on the market, but I decided that I wanted to use it to listen to audiobooks. The only problem? Overcast only works with podcast feeds. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a simple way to manually load in MP3s or point the app directly at a file. However, I didn’t let this limitation discourage me; instead, I came up with a convoluted solution that probably isn’t for the faint of heart.
I’ve already blown past my reading goal for the year on Goodreads (bragging, maybe, but most of the books were graphic novels, which is sort of cheating), so I thought it was high time I started reading something that would offer a bit of a challenge.
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.
Number of books I read last year: 53 2014 was the first year in a good long while where it felt like I might fall short of my reading goal. I’d originally challenged myself to read 75 books – I’ve easily read at least that many for the past few years – but it wasn’t long … Read more
Over at Book Riot, Rachel Smalter Hall talks about how audiobooks became her medium of choice in the year 2013.
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