When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to be alive and talking to me.
Jonathan Swift

The first time I tried to write something worth reading, I quickly discovered that good writing is hard work. What I wrote was silly, I’m sure, but I don’t think it was alive.

All good books have one thing in common: Their authors write in an easy conversational style that makes us feel as if we were listening to a friend telling us a story.

That’s true of what good storytellers have always written, of course, even when we read their books silently to ourselves. When we listen to their stories on audio books, they literally come alive and “talk” to us.

If Swift had written Gulliver’s Travels today, he would have enjoyed narrating his story for us, and we would have received an equal amount of joy in the listening.

I wanted to know what other people are saying about audio books, so I read some online comments. This was my favorite: “I love audio books.

I hate to do housework and exercise, but can make myself do those things if I have a good book to listen to.” The same person went on the say that she listened to the entire New International Version of the Bible in 90 days.

I think that’s absolutely wonderful, and I think it illustrates the great thing about audio books.
I have the Bible on old-fashioned cassettes, but I’ve never listened to all the tapes. They have been sitting in their case gathering dust for years.

I don’t think I have listened to half the cassettes. They are too bulky for me to get any use out of; the cassettes always seem to end at the most inconvenient moments, and I get tired of fooling with them. I am glad that technology has finally caught up with art and literature.

Books are made to be spoken, every bit as much as they are made to be read, and now we can hear books come alive and literally talk to us through all the different formats in which audio books are available today: iPods, MP3 players, and CD players.

I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to change the cassette, and I like that very much.
I have been listening to “audio books” for longer than I can remember. I cannot remember the first time a book was read to me, but I am told that I was minus-3 or minus-4 months old.

My father read Shakespeare to my pregnant mother, and they tell me I always seemed to enjoy it—I kicked in approval at all the right places. I have no memories of that, of course, or of the city of my birth. My parents moved when I was 6 months old.

But I have many memories of Shakespeare—the plays and movies that I have seen and the sonnets I have heard read. I have never been able to read Shakespeare to myself and still get half as much enjoyment out of it.
Shakespeare never meant for us to get enjoyment out of reading to ourselves; his plays and sonnets were meant to be read to someone.

And that is as true today as it was when they were first read on Elizabethan stages.

Be sure to visit Talking-Book-Store.com to hear samples from audio books that contain all of Shakespeare’s greatest works, and enjoy being read to, as it was meant to be.