Audiobooks and Me: The Tale of a Too-busy Grad Student
Audiobooks and the Grad Student
By Alexandra Rosen
So from the title, I am certain you don’t have any questions about what I want to tell you today. We can just preemptively end this article and pretend I didn’t bring it up…NOT! I have been a firm resister of using audiobooks for years now. My significant other, R, loves them, but for the longest time I resisted. I always make him turn his stories off when I get into his car and the only time I listened to an audiobook was when we went on vacation earlier this year. I have finally realized why I had been resisting the draw of the Audiobook.
Audiobooks are not lazy; listening to an audiobook is not like watching television (where you don’t have to work to get the story). I realized my dislike came from the fact that I wasn’t starting the audiobooks at the beginning of the story, so I would become frustrated trying to play catch up. Maybe that seems like a silly reason, but I would contend that it is also a quite valid reason for making R turn them off.
Now, however, I am getting interested in using audiobooks to help me as a graduate student. To be clear, I am pursuing my Master of Arts in English Literature. And I’m continually finding out that I can’t get through as many books as my professors want me to because all I’m doing is reading and I am getting burnt out on the process of attempting to get through two big books every week. All that book reading is in addition to reading long articles for my theory class and one of the big book classes.
