Books have taken me on many fascinating journeys over the years. I have been an airline pilot, I have lived in northern Alaska, I have been a veterinarian, I have been a detective, as well as many other exciting professions. I am in awe of authors.
There has not been a time in my life that I can remember not wanting to read. My taste has changed over the years. When I was younger, all I wanted to read about was horses and dogs, and now I have branched out. Books have always been expensive and most of my reading before getting into a truck was done at the local library. I can still remember the joy of walking into the library and seeing all of those books just waiting for someone to open the cover and disappear for hours.
There are programs where we can check out library books electronically, but I have not found a plan that fits my schedule. If we are running hard, I don’t have a lot of time to read, and then I don’t get to finish the book before it disappears, and I found that problem to be too much stress. We often would go to a used book store in Saint Louis and stock up on books, but the next challenge would be where to put the books.
Once I got the Kindle app and Audible on my mobile devices, I no longer had a storage problem. While driving, I listen to Audible, and when not driving, I use my Kindle app on my iPad, and now I have hundreds of books at my fingertips. When I hear about a new author or book, I can decide if I want to read the book or if I want to listen to the book. When at home, I read my hardcover books as I still like flipping pages, but I have noticed as my eyes are aging, it’s harder to see the words without proper light. Having good light is not a problem with the iPad.
Audible is a massive improvement over buying books on CD as they also took up a lot of room in the truck. We could not listen to the same book on CD as we would lose our place. That’s not a problem with Audible. We can all listen to the same book and be on different chapters.
The books on Audible are not cheap, and we share an account with our daughters and all buy books that we can share. We started our Audible account over ten years ago, and we have 566 books that we can listen to again at any time. What I like about this program is if you get a book that you don’t like or you don’t like the author, you can give it back and get full credit. That’s something we cannot do with a hardcover book.
I get most of my Kindle books off of Amazon, and I often look for free books or deeply discounted books. I have found that I don’t mind rereading good books over and over, but I usually don’t care to listen to a book more than once.
One of the best perks about being a truck driver is all of the time we have to listen to books to learn or to go off on amazing adventures. Sometimes the books are so good it’s hard to shut them down once we reach our destination.
Never being without a book close by is comforting, and there is always something new to learn or another adventure to take.