My Lack of Love Affair With Audible.com

It takes time for me to adapt to technology. It took years for me to get a cellphone and only within the last few years did I get a smartphone. I just started texting a little over a year ago. I mocked friends who were early joiners of Twitter and for a long time thought people who had more than 100 friends on Facebook were just lying and sad. I still don't embrace FourSquare (I really don't want you to know where I am every second of the day plus being mayor appeals to me waaaay too much.) and I've yet to cave and join Google Groups.

And yet, I thought I'd like audible.com. Friend David Horne suggested I try the site that lets me listen to books on my smartphone. The appeal is that since I have a 30-40 minute drive into and home from Greensboro most days, my time would be better spent listening to novels instead of the newest Taylor Swift song. ("We are never ever ever getting back together. Like, EVER.")

My first book selection was/is the novel Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. Amazing writing. Stunning descriptions. Laugh out loud humor. And this is all in the first three chapters... which have taken me almost a month to get through. 

I can't do it. I listen raptly for 10 minutes, then my mind starts to wander. I pull it back and force myself to pay attention to the narrator. But by the 20-minute mark, my mind is elsewhere and suddenly I realize the narrator is reading dialogue between characters I don't even recognize because I blanked out. 

I suspect the problem may be I'm listening to a novel. I listened to a non-fiction self-help sort of book a couple of months ago and loved it. Maybe I need the self-involvement element for car reading to work for me. 

I'm determined to get through the book but at the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky to wrap it up by Christmas. Still, as someone whose cat now has over 5,000 followers on Twitter and who has close to 900 (dear, close) friends herself on Facebook, maybe I'll come around. Maybe audible.com will save me from a lifetime of knowing all the words to every current bad pop song out there. 

Here's hoping. 

Cheers,

Dena