Reading With Your Ears

     You may look at the title of this post and think to yourself ,"Kayla you cant read with your ears, duh!" Well I beg to differ. Ok so you may not be able to literally read with your ears but you sure can listen to a story. Audio books my friends: reading with your ears. I'm sure we all remember in kindergarten when our teacher would have story time. We would all run over and sit criss cross applesauce (doesn't anyone wonder why we say 'applesauce' at the end) on the carpet. Our teacher would read a small picture book written with a sentence on each page and show the picture to the whole class going in a semicircle motion. Do you ever think about why we loved this so much? Some of the slacker kids were probably just like "Yeah we get to zone out for 15 minutes!" Now that I think back on this common school activity I realize how relaxing it is to have a story read to you.

 

     Audio books are like a teacher reading to you only the more mature version. All you have to do is pop the CD into the stereo or press play on your device. Then you sit back, close your eyes, and listen. You don't have to worry about your eyes getting tired from reading line after line and you don't have the problem of the uncomfortable positions you have to read your book in. An audio book does the work for you, leaving you to the imagining. The images described to you can come alive, almost like a dream while your still awake! I have to say though that the voice the audio book is told in has to be engaging. We listened to some of the scenes in Romeo and Juliet on tape and lets just say the voices weren't the best. They were pretty bad, I mean I don't understand how the tape was published! Some voices made the class laugh and others were just plain annoying.

 

     I have made my point that audio books can be more relaxing than books but there's another reason they're good for. In some scenarios audio books are more logical when you want to read. For example when you go on vacation or have a long drive, you may want to read in the car. At least for me this is a problem; I get car sick if I read for too long while in a moving vehicle. Listening to an audio book  eliminates this issue. You still get to hear the story but with out staring down at a small font which leads to an icky feeling stomach. Then there's some strange people who may like to read while swimming or taking a bathe. Hey, I never said I was one of those people but trust me they're out there! A book would get ruined if you dropped it in the water. The pages would wrinkle up and the ink would smear. How about an audio book? No paper, no problem! And of course for those book worms who don't want to look like a nerd. If you put an audio book on your ipod or iphone you can put your headphones in and look like your jamming out to some tunes when really you're reading! Mind blowing right?!?

 

     So for all my avid readers out there, next time when your looking for a book, read with your ears not your eyes. You will be surprised what a difference it is.