I'm A Voracious Reader : childrens

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

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.