Audiobooks Aren’t Cheating

It’s reading that matters, not the medium you choose to read in.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

There is only one good thing to come out of my black hole years — the depressive cycle that dominated my life between 2010 and 2013 — I read a lot.

Those days, I lived a lot of my life playing games. It’s what filled my life, in between meals and filling out job applications, and doing job interviews that never actually led to being hired. There was nothing I could do, nowhere for me to go. So there was just a lot of sitting around.

Wake up, shower, sit down at the computer, scroll through Tumblr, play a game, fill out some job applications, eat, go to bed. Cycle, rinse, repeat.

But the background to this was a series of audiobooks. So many audiobooks.

This is the time where I discovered so many books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series . . . the sheer number of books I listened to is still kind of staggering. It was a soundtrack to fill those dead and empty hours. A series of stories that I could escape into when being in my own head was the last place I wanted to be.

Of course, printed books can serve the same function. And, in my life, they definitely did.