Multi-Format Binge Reading

I’ll be honest. I don’t think I read any book other than the textbooks during the first two years of law school. Or even if I did, I don’t remember. It was a blur—balancing law school, family and my job. I am not counting reading “Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR” by James Lardner in the spring break of my first year of law school. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I had to write an “optional” book report (to earn extra credit) on a famous lawsuit, the “Betamax case” on copyright infringement, that was the essence of the book.

In the third and final year of law school, I discovered audiobooks, and a whole new world of “reading” opened up for me! The first audiobook that I read was a behemoth of a science fiction, named “Seveneves,” by Neal Stephenson. I doubt if I would’ve finished the 880-page book but for the audiobook format. I used to listen to it religiously on my way to work, or pretty much any time I was driving. The first ten or so audiobooks that I read were all DVD or CD-based. It was a little inconvenient to insert a disc into the car’s CD player while driving. Also, I kept thinking that the newer cars won’t even have a CD player. So I explored a bit, and found Audible, the app that lets you download audiobooks into your smartphone and play it from there. After almost two full years of “reading” only audiobooks (with the occasional exception of a paperback or two), this year I am embracing multi-format reading in its full glory.

In February and March this year, I parallely kept reading a novel in hardcover (“Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami), a biography on Kindle (“Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight), and listened to three audiobooks (“1984,” the classic dystopian novel by George Orwell; the hot-selling non-fiction “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff; and “Where the Red Fern Grows,” a young adult book about a boy and his beloved dogs---my son highly recommended this book so that we can share our experiences). This is the closest I have been to binge-reading, something that Bill Gates does encourage (https://yourstory.com/2016/12/bill-gates-book-recommendations/). I noticed the audiobooks were getting finished at the highest rate, thanks to the regularity of commute time listening in the car, followed by Kindle (because I could read in bed even when the lights are off). It took the longest time to finish the hardcover because you can only read when there is ambient light. But each format had other facets that could enhance or diminish the reading experience. 

The hardcover was so beautifully designed that it was a pleasure to hold it in my hand! (http://spinemagazine.co/articles/chip-kidd). Kindle was all about convenience. I actually missed seeing real page numbers in Kindle—percentage of how much you have read is not the same as seeing how many pages you have read. And the appeal of an audiobook is heavily dependent on whether you like the narrator’s voice and style of delivery. But at the end of the day, if you are addicted to reading, you will end up finding a way to read, one format or the other. 

So, happy reading, everyone!