Much of the time I am busy doing something but not really using my mind. I’ve found a way to fill that space at LibriVox. LibriVox offers audio recording of books that are in the public domain. All of the books that I’ve listened to so far have been well done, and the reader for one did as good a job as any other audiobook or dramatic production I’ve heard. In about a week, I’ve listened to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, E. M. Forster’s Howards End, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

To be sure, listening to audiobooks is no substitute for actually reading the book. Both because of the medium and because I’m doing something else at the time, I don’t comprehend as much as I would when reading. But a more valid comparison in my case is between listening to such books and not reading them at all. Most of the time that I can devote to reading is spent on histories that demand my full attention. Recently I’ve read Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, Eugene Genovese’s The Slaveholders’ Dilemma, Samuel Eliot Morison’s By Land and By Sea: Essays and Addresses, Richard Bushman’s From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765, and several books about the slave trade, and I’ve just started Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Audiobooks are a good way to work in some literature too.

I heard about the site from Kellen, who heard about it from Anna Beth. Kellen, Anna Beth, Abby, and I even have tentative plans to do our own recording for LibriVox.