And no, it isn’t Lloyd! Though, if it was, I’d never admitted it to him. He would use any compliment you give him to lord over you. Ha!
So, I’ve been obsessed with books for as long as I can remember. It started for me when I was in primary school and my Mum came to my school in the middle of the day (for reasons, I still have no clue till this date). She popped into my class to see me and left me with a Famous Five book (by Enid Blyton).
I’d never heard of the Famous Five before this point (I was fairly young at this time to be fair) and once I got into the book I was hooked! I couldn’t stop till I finished the book and immediately had to find the next Famous Five book…
…and then the next. Even when I finished that, I moved on to Secret Seven.
From that point onwards, I spent a lot of my free time reading
Anyway, long story short – I was obsessed with books. But then again, I was a kid with lots of free time on my hands so reading physical books was so easy back then.
These days, (and to be honest, ever since I had my first ‘proper job’), I’ve found I have less time to carry a proper book with me.
The last physical book I tried to read was Game of Thrones (when we were on holiday in Cape Verde) and I promptly fell asleep every time. And we’re talking about Game of Thrones here.
I made a switch to audiobooks almost 7 years ago (with the occasional exception of a physical book I can’t find in audio format) back when I was working on a fairly boring job.
It was the kind of job that you didn’t really need to focus on so I was looking for something to keep things interesting – which was when I downloaded The Godfather.
That book was just such an amazing introduction to audiobooks. It was all the pleasure of reading books with none of that manual book holding.
Imagine actually trying to read a proper book like that while on a job; I doubt there are any of us who could have gotten away with that at work.
With audiobooks, you just slipped your earphones on and when you laughed really hard, people around you would just assume there was something super funny about your 10,000-cell Excel spreadsheet (there never was!).
My gripe with audiobooks though was that you had to pay for each one individually and unlike physical books which you could buy second-hand in a bookstore or on sale at certain retailers, audiobooks always had to be paid for at full price for every single book you got.
Those book bills so racked up and although it’s affordable for certain books, it certainly does put a dampener on things.
The ideal thing for me, would have been something like Netflix, where you pay one flat price and access the library of books but I just didn’t know of a single service like this.
So I downloaded my books one at a time (the last audiobook I downloaded was Mindy Kaling – from The Mindy Project’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)” – which is so brilliant and ridiculously funny).
Then I found out about BookBeat (I literally found out about this like 2 weeks ago) and everything changed.
That “Netflix-for-books” service I was looking for was finally here! You can imagine how pleased I was to finally get a service like this for books.
My latest read is a trilogy by Anders de la Motte (never heard of him before) but it’s a Swedish Thriller trilogy and seeing as I really enjoyed “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” trilogy… and “The Hunger Games”… and “Divergent” (though I really hated how this series ended – it was so anticlimactic), I figured I might as well give this a try – so far so good!
Come to think of it, I’d never heard of Stieg Larsson, Suzanne Collins or Veronica Roth prior to reading their trilogies so I’ve had fairly good experience on that front. Will let you know how this current one pans out.
Anyway, I’d love to keep rambling on and on about BookBeat but I’m off to catch a flight and wanna carry on ‘reading’ my book you should definitely download the free BookBeat app for your iPhone/Android.
At the end of the day, this is technically a freebie thus far so you have nothing to lose.
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