Passions: How audiobooks are showing me what I’ve been missing out on

Now I’m not reading them, I would struggle to function without books

This may be an unwise thing to admit, but I never really got the hang of reading books.

I mean, obviously I have read books. Quite a lot of them over the years. Then there are many others for which I've read specific parts or chapters, particularly for the purpose of writing essays as a student, or articles as a journalist.

But the majority of the books on the shelves at home are just gathering dust. I still intend to read most of them, but there is a fair chance I will never get around to it.

With audiobooks you can enjoy books without having to actually read them. Picture: Adobe

The problem is not a lack of interest. Like most people, I can go through several books in a few days while on holiday in the sun. But the habit would never really stay with me after returning home to the rain.

I read news articles all the time, and sport. And at work I spend a large part of every day reading official reports and meeting minutes. But rarely books.

In the last couple of years, however, books have belatedly become an important part of my life - although I’m still not actually reading them.

When my youngest child was born, my wife bought me a trial subscription for a well-known audiobook service.

Her thinking was that it might come in handy for the countless hours we were about to spend sitting up with our daughter overnight.

I was slightly sceptical at first, but now I’d struggle to function without it. It came in handy on a few particularly long nights, however I mainly use it while running.

I’m not particularly prolific – I’ve been through a dozen books in the two years, although I have listened to one of them twice (Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer).

The app tells me this has amounted to the equivalent of five-and-a-half full days of non-stop listening. In fact, I'm one hour away from moving up a "level" from "novice" to "pro".

The journey started with Putin’s People by Catherine Belton, but my earphones have since brought me several works of fiction, including The Young Team by Graeme Armstrong and Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan.

And it has taken me deep into worlds I knew nothing about before audiobooks, including high altitude mountaineering (Into Thin Air, Eiger Dreams, Touching the Void), doping in professional cycling (Racing Through The Dark and The Death of Marco Pantani), and even fundamentalist Mormonism (Under the Banner of Heaven).

In 2024, I’m looking forward to finding out what else I’ve been missing out on, as I make up for lost time.

Calum Ross is Education Correspondent of The Scotsman