First of all, congratulations! That is a serious undertaking and finishing it is quite an accomplishment.

I’m sure there are a host of subconscious and barely-conscious reasons I keep my father’s pictures in the book. It would probably take an INFINITE JEST-like effort to figure it all out, and who has time for that?

Well, I usually listen to audiobooks in the bathtub where none of the tasks are too pre-occupying. I treat listening to a book much like I treat reading a book. That is, I don’t do anything besides listen/read. You’d probably miss out on continuity or something if you were watching TV or a movie while reading a book too.

A lot of the books translate pretty well. There are some I love listening to so much I’ve listened to them over and over again (The Fault in Our Stars by John Green being one). There are also times where I ping pong between the audio and the written book (this works well with doorstops ala Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet).

I’m kind of a finicky, nit-picky reader and I find I’m more forgiving when I listen to books. Some sentences, paragraphs, etc. sound better than they look on the page. Also, this prevents me from constantly copyediting/re-writing awkward sentences, so that’s nice.

From your experience, how well do think the written word translates as an audio book? From my limited experience, not very well. Usually I am preoccupied with a task and miss out on the story’s continuity.

I am going to listen to Infinite Jest this winter. . . I am so excited. I’m curious to see how it goes. The audiobook is 56 hours long & comes with a PDF of the footnotes.