This week ended up with a theme of rest/sleep for our athletes. I thought it only fair to give some emphasis on rest and sleep for us as parents. I am guilty of not allowing enough time for sleep. I have found something that definitely gives me better quality rest and sleep, though. That something is the simple act of exercising. You all know the many benefits of exercise, so I won’t go into them.
The problem I have is that I get bored very quickly with exercise. That is, I did until I started listening to audio books. For me, audio books are the perfect solution to what could be a mind-numbing hour of torture.
When I decided to listen to audio books, I ran into two problems. One is that audio books are expensive. The other is that I decided to listen to classics in an effort to exercise my mind along with my body. When I looked for classics in the form of audio books, I could find very few unabridged versions. So I did some online research and found audible.com.
I have to say, I’m impressed. The best offer audible.com has is if you pay $7.49 for an audio book each month for 3 months, then $14.95 for an audio book each month after that. Believe me, that’s a good deal. And if you find you don’t like audible.com, you can cancel your subscription at any time.
I started listening to Charles Dickens books in December and found it takes me a little over a month to listen to one Charles Dickens book if I listen each time I work out. That’s typically 1 hour 3 times per week and 5-20 minutes each of the other days.
Audible.com has over 75,000 titles, so there are plenty of audio books to choose from. I was amazed at how many different unabridged versions were available of the Charles Dickens books. I had difficulty finding any unabridged audio versions of Dickens’ books in large U.S. bookstores or even in London’s largest bookstore. Audible.com has reviews and audio previews so that I could easily choose the best narrator for me. And the price is less than ordering from a bookstore – even an online bookstore.
In addition to books in every genre, audible.com has magazines, radio shows, podcasts, stand-up comedy, and speeches. I listen to the audio books on my laptop, but you can also burn them to a CD or download them to iPod, iPhone, BlackBerry, or any of about 500 mobile devices.
If you’re like me and want to work out but need something to keep your mind busy, I definitely recommend audible.com.
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Hey, Deb.
My husband is a big fan of audio books. He goes online to our library system's catalog, requests them from any library in the system, and has them delivered as CDs to our library.
I just bought him a sweet MP3 player that's Audible compatible. And – get this – our library system has Audible books! They allow a certain number of patrons to download a book. The book expires after a certain amount of time and then someone else can virtually check it out. Pretty darn cool.
However, Ice Dad only listens to boring books. Seriously. The history of the Oxford English Dictionary? *snooze*
Ice Mom
That is pretty darn cool, Ice Mom. I have to agree with your assessment of Ice Dad’s book selections, though. I guess he’s just really serious about the exercising-the-brain theory.