Audiobook Challenge 2020

Hosted by Hot Listens and Caffeinated Reviewer

I'm joining the #2020AudiobookChallenge

Sign up here if you want to play along.

I'm aiming for: Level ~ Stenographer (10-15)

I used to listen to audios all the time, but now that I'm not listening each night with the kids (they're adults now) or delivering the newspaper, I just can't seem to carve out any time to listen. And since I don't live alone I can't exactly put a book on, out loud, while I clean. However, I bought a new 7" Fire just so I could have Audible. My old 1st gen Fire doesn't support that app anymore, so the new one should be perfect. It would be even better if I had some wireless headphones, but I didn't get any for Christmas. I guess I just need to buy them for myself. What else is new? *shrugs* I'm going to attempt 1 audiobook a month which seems a reasonable number to me since I'm trying to get back into the swing of listening. Plus, I'd like to get back on the treadmill, so 1 book a month should work to keep me occupied. We'll see how it goes. 

First, I need to clean up the old guestroom that is now the cat room and get stuff out of my way and off the treadmill. I mean, do the cats really need an old car seat box with a blanket in it on top of the treadmill? Well, yeah, they probably do, but it's got to go. lol I wish the room were bigger, but the treadmill and the elliptical take up nearly all of the floor space. Also, we'll see what the podiatrist says about my left foot. I did something to it a few months back when I was mowing and it's not getting any better. It would probably heal if I kept off it and remembered to take ibuprofen on a regular basis. Oh, well. I have appt with him today, so we'll see.

Audio Blitz ~ The Journals of Octavia Hollows

Do you like urban fantasy and snarky heroines? Then you'll want to meet necromancer Octavia Hollows and her sidekick Bacon. We are celebrating the release of The Journals of Octavia Hollows by Stacey Rourke on Audio. This collection features all six journals in the series and was published by The Audio Flow. Come fall in love with this feisty heroine, her pet pig, and the brilliant narration provided by Brenda Scott Wlazlo.

12 Years of Audiobooks with the Kids

Books have been a huge part of my life since I was very young and I wanted to instill that love in my kids. So I bought them books every chance I got, starting with baby books and progressing to the adult books they read today. Our family currently has a home library in excess of 14,000 books (not including what's on both of my Kindles). However, reading out loud to them killed my throat. Until the day I had a lightbulb moment. Audiobooks! And a tradition was born. Every evening we listened to 1 disk of an audiobook. Once everyone was in school I changed it to a disk on school nights, so we would listen Sun-Thurs with weekends off. We would get slack in the summer, but we didn't stop listening completely. More than 12 years have gone by and we are still listening. We started with A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket and are currently listening to The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. With my daughter graduating this year the fate of the audiobook is up in the air. Will the boys continue on? Or stop in favor of reading their own books in that time slot? I guess it depends on if we find a series we enjoy. We're almost caught up to the newest Dresden book, so I'm not sure what we'll pick up next. Will we finish the Benny Imura series by Jonathon Mayberry? Or maybe the Study series by Maria V. Snyder? I'm sure they'll want to finish The Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan now that it's complete and perhaps we'll give The Lord of the Rings another try with a different narrator. Only time will tell.

We had fun sitting down and trying to list all the books we've covered over the years. Between us we managed to get nearly all of them and I discovered a few forgotten ones when I looked through some Goodreads lists. I'm pretty sure the following list is fairly well complete. Not too shabby considering I never kept track of our books until 2011 and there's no way to go back and see what I got from the library. I only bought a few series on CD and a couple from Audible.