I’ve never been a fan of audiobooks, I tried them once or twice in the past but just couldn’t concentrate on them. Recently I kept thinking about them however, it seemed like the perfect way to add more reading time to my day. Two weeks ago I decided to give the free trial at Storytel a try! Read on to find out how this is all went for me!

The first thing I did was look at the different providers of audiobooks. One of the biggest ones is Audible, they give you one credit a month for your subscription. With that credit you can get one book, the rest of the books you want to listen to you’ll have to buy. To be honest, I don’t really like this concept. There’s a Dutch company where you can get an audiobook subscription, this one works more like a Netflix account. You can listen to all the books you want in a month. I personally like this way better, especially as the costs are roughly the same as for Audible. They offered a two week trial which I gladly used. I read mostly English and I was afraid that they would only have Dutch audiobooks. I was pleasantly surprised to find a pretty big assortment of English books. And they’re pretty recent too! For example Turtles All The Way Down and Love, Life and the List.

So, the price is quite decent and the assortment is pretty great! Now on to the most important question; do I like listening to them?! The first book I listened to was Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda. This book has been on my tbr forever. I started with this one as it seemed like a pretty easy one to listen to. The book wasn’t too long and I listened while working. At one of my jobs I do pretty easy work and it’s no problem for me to listen to an audiobook during that. It was actually during work that I got the idea to start listening to audiobooks. While I enjoyed listening a lot, there are some downsides to it. For me personally the biggest one is that I do tend to lose concentration every once in a while. When you’re reading a physical book or an ebook and you’re concentration fades you simply don’t read any further, but when that happens when listening to an audiobook you all of a sudden missed a couple of sentences in the story. I think this definitely takes away a bit of the story. At the same time I believe I can kind of train myself, so we’ll see how this goes!

I started listening to Harry Potter after that first audiobook. I knew it wouldn’t be a problem if I missed a bit while listening, as I basically know these books by heart haha. Storytel has the one narrated by Stephen Fry and I must say, these are near bloody perfection! I’m enjoying them so so much. I already listened to the first 4, and that fourth one was over 16 hours! I had surgery last week and listening to the audiobooks was so much easier than actually reading while I was recovering. I had to force myself to keep on reading the physical book I had started because I’m kind of addicted to them at the moment haha. I need to at least finish that book before I let myself start the fifth book (23 hours!!!!). I think I might be able to read at least 26 more books this year thanks to audiobooks, w’ll see at the end of the year if I’m right!

For now these are on my to listen list:
– the rest of the Harry Potter series
– Ready Player One (a reread for the movie comes out!)
– The Fellowship of the Ring
– The Book Thief
– The Handmaid’s Tale
– Beauty Queens (another reread)
– American Gods
– Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
– Big Little Lies

Do you have any other recommendations for me? Let me know! And what’s your opinion on audiobooks