Recently I drove for 26 hours over two days between Switzerland and France and I used Audible rather than Audiobookshelf to listen. The reason for this is that when I am driving I do not want to fiddle with an app on a phone. I don’t even want to fiddle with apps on Car Play.
I noticed that PocketCasts, the Podcast App, MyCitroën and even TomTom can be quite distracting when you’re trying to set things up when you’re driving.
Some people aim to read twenty books per year. Others aim for a book a week. I read 15 or so books last year which doesn’t feel like much, compared to others. Having said that, I don’t read like others. When I read I flit between books. I might start three or four books within a few days, and gently make progress for weeks or months at a time.
Since the books are often not finished I might read hundreds of pages but it doesn’t appear in the reading stats.
I have often had the temptation to dump Audible.com since it was bought by Amazon but I haven’t. It used to be that I had so many books that I didn’t want to lose them. Now that I have my own self-hosting solution, Audiobookshelf, for my own listening of my own books I can toy the idea of sliding to another provider. The first option is Kobo.
Kobo offers a plan for about 12 CHF per month for access to unlimited books to be read at once on its own catalgue but the catalogue is a quarter as big as that of Amazon/Audible so it would seriously limit what I can read and listen to.
In December I read The Midnight Library with ease. It is a lighter book than others and I could see parallels between Midnight Library and The Good Place. Specifically imagine a reality where you get to try reality after reality, after reality until you learn what you needed to learn, before the book or television series ends.
In the Good Place and the Midnight Library one or more individuals have the opportunity to try life A before trying life B before trying life C, over and over again.
It’s funny. It is a drive that I have done plenty of times. Tomorrow I will do the usual twelve hour drive from Switzerland to around Alicante, and I will do so with minimal stops.
In essence the drive is easy. I take the motorway from Nyon all the way to Ondara, with a small segment on open roads around Grenoble. It’s long, but easy.
There is a difficulty that I face.
Recently people wanted to move from Goodreads to open alternatives to move away from the grasp of Amazon. I wanted to do the same so I moved to two or three apps and used them for a while. I stopped using them for one simple reason.
They don’t have an extensive library of books, so when you start to read a book you can either spend several minutes adding all the information about the book you’re reading into the system, or you can save time and stick with Goodreads.
Last night I went to bed at a reasonable time. I took the time for a three pass shave with a DE blade, and then I browsed content. Eventually, at a reasonable time I opened the Kindle app on my phone to see how the choice of books has changed since the last time I looked. The result is that I found a new series of books to read.
I settled on The Complete McGann Naval Adventures.
For years I have been tracking my reading, whether by Goodreads or Audible but more recently, within the last four months, or so, I also started using Bookmory, booktracker and a fourth one but I don’t remember the name. The one whose name I forgot was abandonned because it forgot my login information after an app update and I couldn’t be bothered renewing it, especially as I was been nagged to pay a monthly fee.
According to Goodreads I am currently reading 97 books but in reality I am reading between three to five books consistently at the moment. I read several books at once because it gives me time to absorb ideas from one book whilst reading a second book, and then a third, and so on.
I, Robot Although the book was written in 1950 it is still worth reading today. It shows the way people thought about computers back then.
Last night I was reading from a book, rather than from a kindle or audible book. As a result I had to keep the bedside light on. I also had to ensure that the light light the pages of the book. I was reading from the book “Beneath My Feet, Writers on Walking” introduced and edited by Duncan Minshull and I came across an exert written by Karl Philips Moritz. He wrote Journeys of a German in England in 1782.