It occurred to me today that I read too much and not enough. I am a hoarder, as I mentioned before, and being a denizen of the digital age has enabled my tendency to hoard articles with the intention to read them later but in actuality is actually never because I dislike reading on screens. This changed however, when I discovered the Readability app. I realized I disliked reading varying types of fonts on ad-cluttered web-pages, and Readability basically takes articles from any webpage and formats them into a simple streamlined single page, ad free. You can choose to read an article immediately, save it for later (and download it onto the app so you can access it even without internet) and send it to your Kindle. The app has revolutionized my online reading habits. Namely, now I actually read the articles I save, and, in an extremely delayed showing of gratitude, can import the articles to the Kindle my brother so kindly bought me nearly two years ago.
Also, another delayed discovery: Audiobooks. More specifically, free audiobooks from my local library. I should have done this a million years ago (aka last year), when one of my unwavering complaints about working life was the long commute, which wasn’t even that long compared to my colleagues who woke at 4 or 5AM to drive into South Irvine from Pasadena/Arcadia! (Though in their case audiobooks could hardly be a long-term solution…I still think they should relocate/find a closer job). Looking back, I doubt audiobooks could have made me stay at The Company longer, but I definitely would be a helluva lot more well read.
Now with grandma in a hospital forty miles away, I have found an ideal car ride buddy in audiobooks and do not mind the commute so much. Over the past two and a half weeks I finished Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck! which, 15 hours in audio form, is read by the wonderful Bob Balaban whose soothing voice makes the grisly details of the story’s murder seem almost poetic. I had been meaning to read it for ages, and instead had it backed up and festering on my Amazon wishlist. When I think about all the books I could have “read” on the road in the past year… it makes me sad.
So there you go, solutions on how to read everywhere: the Readability App and Audiobooks.
VERY HIGHBROW 