For audiobooks, I experiment with authors and genres I'm uncertain I'd like, but reserve reading for stuff I expect to be good. I've also got a few "started as an audiobook, was great, but will continue as an audiobook". Really takes the tedium out of many chores.

Apologies if some aren’t old enough but they are considered classics…. Window with a view Ethan frome 1984 A moveable feast The Death of Ivan Ilych The wind in the willows Billy Budd Sailor Bartleby the Scivenor (any Herman Melville short will honestly be good as a starting place) The metamorphosis Northanger Abbey (my favorite Jane Austen) We have always lived in the castle If Beale street could talk A Christmas Carol

For book suggestions the mods are going to ask you to take your question to r/suggestmeabook or r/booksuggestions.

Reddit also has r/romancebooks, r/historicalfiction, r/horrorlit, r/fantasy and r/printsf.

You may not be ready yet, depending on how old you are, but sometime I would encourage you to read Flow the psychology of optimal experience by Csikzentmihalyi, Bowling Alone, Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, Watership Down, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Paper Castles, Captain's Courageous by Kipling, the Millionaire Next Door and Deep Survival by Gonzalez.

Best wishes for your future.

Can't hurt me - David Goggins No matter how many self help books you read you are going to eventually have to start putting in the work. Here's someone who shows you some of what's possible when you do. I'm on his second book now. I'd recommend them as audible instead of paper or Kindle. He has conversations in between chapters, about what happened in the chapter, so it goes farther than the other mediums.

I don’t know if this is the case for all editions of the book, but when I read it, there was a list of both historical and current characters with a brief, spoiler-free description and there was a timeline with major events over the past 1,000 years in the back of the book. I found those helpful to keep everything in order while I read.

The Nose! The Nose is my favorite

There isn't anything I would rule out completely, personally. It all depends on how the writer approaches it and how they deal with the material.

Long names?

Randomly picked a very good book.

Uhm, I loved the whole book, only that at times Cathy's description was borderline unrealistic. I found Aaron and Caleb's development interesting to watch and Abra took the dynamics to a whole new level. Anyways, to think that people like them exist and strong bonds like theirs happen makes me wanna cry a bit. 🤷

Do what you want

Time Traveller's Wife

I was appalled by that as well especially how no one was empathetic to her passing and still referred to her as that even at her empty funeral. So sad and truly awful.

I use audiobooks sometimes. They have a time and a place, especially once I get tired of my workout playlists. Long drives are another great place for them.

But my retention is much worse, so I'm mostly listening to stories with simple sentence structure, simple arcs, and high quality narrators.

Anything I really wanna enjoy and savor I read though.

I feel like there's a crowd that listens to audiobooks as basically background noise (which affects their retention and ability to actually enjoy the text) that seem to be very obsessed with how many books they read in X amount of time. I don't enjoy that part of the bookish subreddits, otherwise it's just a different medium to experience books in.

It could just be a possibility of a book you don’t mesh well with. If I have to go back and read the beginning again, I don’t finish the book.

Audiobooks are books. I think that's important to state first. Some people want to be snobby about it, but they are still books. It's a different way to experience them, but they still "count".

Audiobooks suit some people extremely well. They suit other people not at all. Personal preference matters. The best time for audiobooks is probably long drives, but there are other times when they are good as well. Reading a paperback while driving would be a horrible idea.

Audiobooks are also fantastic for certain people with disabilities, eg visual problems or possibly severe dyslexia or something (I'm not an expert in those things, but hopefully you get the basic concept). If you're in a full body cast, you might have trouble turning pages.

I do not like listening to audiobooks myself. (They annoy me.) However, I'm glad that they exist and I think that people need to respect the people who experience their books via audiobook format. It expands the world of reading to more people. It adds more options. That's fantastic.

I absolutely agree Steinbeck’s imagery is some of the absolute best. For me personally, I absolutely enjoyed what happened between Adam, Charles and Kathy. I wasn’t to invested in Aaron and Caleb. The book is very long so it took me awhile too.

I definitely feel like you have this idea in your head of what a cruise is like that is not that close to what it is actually like. Outside of a tiny subset, a spring break atmosphere it is not.

Generally it's closer to a week at a resort hotel that people bring their kids to.

I wish but I zone out and don’t pay attention. I give up

You're probably right haha. I think the fact that I can't tell sometimes is part of the magic.

It is a firm representing the victims but it's not like the cruise liners themselves will be upront with the statistics.

>They'll lose their job

That's an issue I came across in this article. Cruise liners can very easily say "he's not a sex pest, he just violated company policy".

You're right that you probably won't get repeat offenders due to CCTV, but the environment of 24 hour good vibes and festivities reminds me too much of college campuses which don't have an amazing track record for sexual offenses. I can only imagine how much of this stuff goes unreported on ships for fear of retaliation.

I loved the movie as a kid. I have the book on my to read list. Very similar?

I've got good news for you. The entire series is pretty solid.

I still haven’t read it yet either. 😢❤️

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