I think my predilection for reading books the last few years might be the result of how easy it is to track reading books. I spent many hours listening to the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan, but at the end of it, it was only the fact that I then went on to read his book based on all of those hours that was recorded for posterity.
I finished an audiobook recently, and marked it as completed at Bookrastinating. Then I started a podcast that has been recommended to me repeatedly. If it were a podcast with an unknown number of episodes that went on and on, I might not even think of the two activities as similar, despite both involving spoken audio I listen to in the same personal contexts (mostly during exercise). But this podcast is ten episodes long, with each episode about an hour long, so it is very, very much like starting a ten-hour audiobook.
At the end of these ten hours, I might know more, or be more entertained, or both, but I won’t have anything to record the event and look back at later, no trigger for memories in years to come, like I will with the audiobook that preceded it in that personal time slot.
Although I had not actively considered it before starting this post, both the podcast season and the novel are the first entries in a trilogy. At least for now. It might be more likely that the podcast produces a fourth season than the author writes another book in that series, but there are a number of series of audiobooks that go on for many volumes. I count 48 “seasons” of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct available for me to listen to, for example.
So why is is a seven-hour audiobook a “book,” while a ten-hour podcast season is not?
So now it is.
https://bookrastinating.com/book/428813/s/blowback-season-1
It turns out to already be a book on GoodReads, but BookWyrm relies on user-generated content, and I might be the first BookWyrm user to listen to Blowback Season 1, making it my job to add it to the database. If, as I suspect I will, I decide to listen to season 2 later, I’ll add that then.
#books #blog #personal #bookstodon #Bookwyrm #Bookrastinating
