Last year, my friend Beth (founder of Smart Girls with ADHD) shared her affinity for audiobooks on her blog.
I disagreed completely. You can’t listen to music while reading an audiobook, and I like blocking out auditory distractions with music (well, okay, you can, but that requires wizardry). I’d tried one audiobook around that time, Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie, and while the story immersed me, I preferred reading its sequel After Ever After as an eBook (I ended up also buying Dangerous Pie as an eBook to re-read). Plus, I can read with my eyes just fine (I mean, the whole ADHD jumping paragraphs bit and rereading stuff is annoying but hey, whatever, that’s my life.)
Well, here we are a year later. And I get it.
Guys, you can play games on your phone while reading audiobooks. You can walk around the mall while reading audiobooks. If your fellow passengers aren’t too chatty, you can read audiobooks on the bus even if you have motion sickness (which I do not, but whatever, I can still look for my stop since the speakers do not always work, ahem Transit). These things are all great for mind-wandering ADHDers who need to keep some part of their body moving beyond flipping pages, and multi-task to a degree to focus… And so we’re more likely to not miss our bus stops maybe, but that happens regardless so I’m not holding my breath on audiobooks helping that too much. 😉 Sometimes I have to rewind, but OverDrive (the player my—and many—libraries uses) has a skip backwards 15 seconds button just for the spacing out times or the people nearby getting too loud times. Oh, and recall that they said in my assessment that I’m more likely to retain information that I get through the auditory bit of my brain than the visual bit.
EDIT: Oh, and you can play Pokemon Go while reading. Heyyyyo.
IT ALL MAKES SENSE.
I set myself a goal to read 40 books this year (last year I think I tried to read 75 books and failed, obviously, reading 30, so 40 seemed like enough of a jump). Except now it’s July so we are more than halfway through 2016 and I’ve read, um, not even half. (If you want to bug me on GoodReads, be my friend!)
Here’s what I’ve read so far:
- Freak the Mighty (Rodman Philbrick)
- Smiling Mind – Mindfulness Made Easy
- A Mother’s Reckoning – Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (Sue Klebold)
- The Summer Before [the Baby-Sitters Club] (Ann M. Martin)
- Shot in the Dark (Janet M. Whyte) [Audio]
- Every Day (David Levithan) [Audio]
- After (Amy Efaw) [Audio]
Here’s what I’m in the middle of:
- Islands and Insulin (Erin Spineto)
- Millersville (Brendan Detzner)
Some catching up is in order.
Maybe with my ears.