When I was little, my parents borrowed audiobooks from the library so we could listen to them on long road trips. Mum is an English teacher, and she was always good at finding the really funny ones. Since then, I haven't really listened to them until this year. A couple of months ago I subscribed to Audible because someone I follow online had one of those deals for a free book. When I was younger, I used to go to the bookshop and look at the audiobooks and sigh because they were always ridiculously priced. Now I pay $15 a month and I get a monthly credit, which is so much cheaper than buying an audiobook on CD for something like $100 (I may be exaggerating but this was totally the price for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in my memories).
So, I paid my subscription fee and I was getting credits but I wasn't actually buying anything. Then I realised that I can listen to things that I would never have the time to read because I'm in my last semester of grad school. I listen to my audiobooks when I'm on the train to and from uni. (I also sometimes listen to them before I go to bed, which I don't recommend because I always fall asleep and it's really difficult to figure out how much you've missed). What I have bought so far are the second and third books in The Hunger Games trilogy (which I have read), and the first half of Game of Thrones, which I haven't. Those books are so huge that the audiobooks come in two parts. So it would basically be $200 for every instalment of the trilogy if you were to buy them on CDs.
I'm enjoying Game of Thrones so far - I'm halfway through the first part of the book - but there was one part that really bored me towards the start, which is the description of how much Bran loves climbing. This probably only took up one or two pages of the book (which really, is too much, you only need two paragraphs at the most and even that is stretching it. See also: JRR Tolkien's description of the leaves of Lothlorien or whatever they're called), but it took up about 10 minutes of my train ride one day, and I knew what was going to happen. When you're reading, you can just skim that part and then when it's moved on it's fine. Much more difficult with an audiobook, particularly on a Kindle when you can only skip forwards or backwards 30 seconds at a time. Anyway, as annoyed as I was about that, the next chapter from Bran's point of view was fantastic: I loved the dream sequence with the crow, and I think it was beautifully written. There's a chance I may have skipped that if I was reading a physical copy of the book, but I don't know.
So there are some hopefully coherent thoughts I have on audiobooks, as they relate to Game of Thrones. I'm really enjoying my audiobook experience. Next I might try Bossypants because I have been told that Tina Fey narrates it herself.
