Listening to All the Books I Want to Read

A dispatch from the reading life.

By Jean-Honoré Fragonard - National Gallery of Art., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130064

I had a neighbor once who used to walk and read a book at the same time. She’d carry it in front of her face and stroll along the neighborhood sidewalks. This fascinated me because I know the feeling of not wanting to put a book down. I haven’t so far in my life been compelled to bring my book along on my walks… or to get up and walk when I sit down to read. But maybe I just hadn’t thought of it.

I was fascinated and curious, less so when I saw that the book was usually the Bible. My only interactions with her—aside from polite, impersonal waves in passing—revolved around her buttering me up for my wifi password, which of course I let her have. But that’s about all I remember of her. She and her husband didn’t live next door for long, maybe a year or less. Anyway, the reason I I’ve been thinking about her at all is because I’ve been reading while walking lately, only with audio books.

Do you remember books on tape? They were picture books with an accompanying cassette audio. I loved these as a kid and played them regularly on my Fisher-Price portable tape player. I can still remember the spinning wire rack of them at the library, book and tape held in a clear plastic bag with hard plastic handles; pressing play and reading along. But in my adult life, I don’t often have the opportunity for audio books.

However, when school started last August, and because of logistics and traffic patterns and timing, I began spending almost a half an hour in my car every day picking up the kids. And so I started borrowing audio books on the library’s Hoopla app. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Hoopla allows people with a library card to borrow ebooks, audio books, and even movies that can be watched on your television. Your library probably has something similar if not the same app. The problem with picking up this habit was that I don’t need any new sources of books to read.

I don’t buy many things these days, but I do buy books, especially when I have money and/or when the books are on sale. I usually read them all, but there are always a few stragglers that I don’t get to. A few where the moment hasn’t arrived, or some idea has taken me in another direction. Sometimes I have to read certain things because I need something to write about, and I tend to favor new books so I can write reviews about them for the paper and compile my year-end list. This is the conundrum of the reading life: how to read them all.

Over the years, I have accumulated a number of books that I really want to read. I want to read them so bad that I spent money on them. And so I decided, while getting into this Hoopla thing, to borrow audio books that were already sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read.

Hooked is the only way to describe what happened next. Listening to audio books from my backlist of books to read quickly replaced my dog-walking playlist and my podcast consumption. And because I have the books on my shelf, I often found myself looking up parts to reread after listening and even abandoning the audio version altogether to finish the books on paper when I’m sucked in.

This happened several times. The Dutch House by Anne Patchett is read by Tom Hanks, and it was so good that I quickly abandoned the audio because I couldn’t wait to finish it. The Sisters Brothers was another one. I have no idea what took me so long to read that book. It was better than the movie, which I promptly watched when I finished the book and also enjoyed. Sometimes I buy books that I want to read, but then put them off because I know they’ll be tough. Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome was one of me those. During the pandemic, my graduate school hosted him on a Zoom talk that they opened to alums. I attended and dutifully bought the book, which had recently come out. But I knew it would not be a light read. So it sat there on my shelf until a few months ago, when I borrowed it on Hoopla. I abandoned the audio on this one too, but Mr. Broome read the book himself, and it was fabulous to listen to as well as read. What’s so great about audio books and their rising popularity is that they can become a lovely work in themselves. I mean, Tom Hanks reading The Dutch House is truly something to hear.

I don’t know if listening to an audio book counts as reading. There is much made of this debate online, which I don’t really care about. Everyone gets to make their own rules when it comes to reading. I do feel, afterward, more or less the same as if I’ve read a book. So I’m counting it. For me, all this means is that I listed these books on my notes app reading list along with all the others.

School is out now. This is our first week of summer vacation, and so there won’t be any car lines for a few months. Reading books quietly is easier than listening to books with kids around, and it’s so hot here that the dog walks will be shorter and less frequent. My dog isn’t a heat tolerant variety. I will also be reading my next book probably ten or a million times this summer, getting it ready to publish (!!). I have some forthcoming releases that I have to read. And there won’t be as much time for audio books.

But I looked back at my reading list, and during the school year I listened to twenty-five books. Twenty-five! That’s a little over a quarter of all the books I read during that time, which, if you’re the kind of person who ever experiences guilt about buying more books when you still have unread ones at home, or the quiet shame associated with taking too long to get to a book, then you will understand the significance of this. I am absolutely delighted with my audio book listening experiment. I might run out of books to read if I do it again when the next school year rolls around. But let’s not talk about that. We have all summer. Who knows what will happen. I could leave the dog behind and take a book on my walks instead. I’ve seen it done.

Thank you for reading!

Melinda

P.S. I’m doing this thing right now called #1000wordsofsummer, which is an annual writing event organized by the writer Jami Attenberg where lots of writers on the internet write a thousand words a day for two weeks. I’ve done it before; Love and the Downfall of Society started as a #1000wordsofsummer project. The timing this year is perfect for me because I just finished the first solid draft of the third book in my series a few weeks ago, and now is the perfect time to generate a few new short pieces.

Writing has been kind of a slog for me lately. I’ve been doing it for long enough to know that this happens sometimes, and usually it means nothing except that I have to work whether it’s easy or not. But last week, on my last two precious school days with the house to myself, I basically stared at a blank page, dismissing every idea that came to me. Lo and behold, when I sat down on Saturday for the first day of #1000wordsofsummer, I wrote a thousand words on a new short story. The next day it happened again. And so the work continues. *Fingers crossed* I will be sending you some of these new stories this summer.

---

You’re reading Melinda’s Letter, a monthly email about books, culture, and life from essayist and historical romance author, Melinda Copp. I’m also on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky.