Tue, 03/20/2018 - 8:30am

Desiree Scorcia

My daughters and I listened to “The Giver” by Lois Lowry in the car this weekend. It was so good! So good, in fact, that I downloaded the eBook and finished reading while the kids were watching a movie (we’d arrived at our destination only half-way through the book). I’m one of those people who gets totally engrossed in a book and can’t stop reading.

I’m also one of those people who doesn’t sneak around well, because Maggie caught me reading ahead and was furious.

I wish I’d started playing audiobooks on road trips a long time ago, because we could have listened to most of the classics by now; “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Little Women,” “Where the Red Fern Grows” … Singing along with the radio is fun, don’t get me wrong, but there’s only so many times in a weekend that you can hear the same Ed Sheeran song.

It’s not too late to start now though, for me or for you.

My car insurance company lured me into downloading an app to track my driving. For a minuscule discount, it watches how I drive and gives me feedback (apparently I have a slight tendency toward “hard braking”). But it also tells me how many miles I’ve driven, and (here comes my point in telling you this) how much of my finite lifespan has been spent behind the wheel of my car.

Since I installed the app in January, I’ve already driven 1,484 miles and spent 27.5 hours behind the wheel. I know that’s a lot less time than many people spend driving, but still. I could have listened to four or five books by now!

There are lots of ways to access audio books. We have more than a thousand titles on CD at the library that you can take home today, and we can borrow many titles we don’t own from other libraries in the Minerva consortium.

There are even still a few titles we can get on cassette tape, if that’s what you’re working with.

I borrow my audiobooks through the CloudLibrary app on my phone. If you haven’t downloaded this one yet, you should go do it right now. Open the App Store or Play Store on your phone and search “clouldlibrary.” You’re looking for the one with the letters “CL” inside a cloud.

Once you install that, you’ll select your country, state and library, and then enter your library card number (don’t forget that it starts with “bbh”).

If installing apps isn’t your thing, bring your phone to the library and we’ll install it with you.

I am old enough that I prefer to browse the selection of books on a bigger screen, so I head towww.bbhlibrary.org and start my search there. Then, when I open the app on my phone, I download it so I can listen in the car.

Ample research shows that hearing a story with your ears has all the brain benefits of reading one with your eyes, so you’ll be doing yourself all kinds of favors. Give it a try!