Barbara Wood's On the Home Front: How to read while working Barbara Wood's On the Home Front: How to read while working (July 21, 2004)

As a person who has never, ever, had enough time to read half of what I want to read, I made a life-changing discovery recently -- recorded books.

Like most people, I had listened to a few recorded books in the car on long road trips. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee was a favorite of the whole family and I'll never forget the 11-hours-each-way trip to and from Sunriver, Oregon, listening to David Sedaris read everything he ever wrote.

But then I decided to paint the interior of the 2,000-square-foot addition to our house. Painting doesn't require much intellectual involvement, and I rapidly tired of listening to the workers' "all-sports, all-day" radio stations. So I grabbed my jogging tape player with headphones and walked to the library.

I happily painted away listening to books while my tape player developed an interesting paint patina. Battery life was a problem, so I upgraded to rechargeables. I soon traded for one of my kids' compact disc players so I didn't have to change the tapes as often.

The only problem was the fact that I kept dropping the player from places like ladders. So I made a pouch for the player from an old purse and substantially lengthened the amount of time I could go before killing one. One even survived slipping from my waist and being submerged in the dogs' water basin.

By the time I was done painting I was hooked. I found I could listen while doing housework, watering the garden, cooking and sewing as well as driving the car or walking the dog.

I also discovered that although the Woodside library has a very small recorded books collection, the Peninsula Library System has just about everything. All I had to do to get it was go to their Web site (http://www.plsinfo.org/) and have it sent to my library. And the wait for popular just-released books is usually shorter for recorded books than hardbacks.

Because talented actors read the books, they can be very entertaining. "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown was wonderful on disc since much of it takes place in Europe and the reader was great with all the accents. Other books are read by their authors -- I'm waiting right now for David Sedaris' latest, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," and recently listened to Toni Morrison read "Love."

One of my favorite "listens" was "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole, a very funny rant about an unhappy young man and his mother, which was the only book written by its author before his suicide in 1969.

Because of the limited selection in my library I've listened to a lot of books I never would have read. But who's to say I'm not better off for having discovered Lisa Scottoline or Walter Mosley or having listened to Seamus Heaney reading "Beowulf."

I'm thinking, however, that I'm going to have to soon upgrade to a MP3 player, which digitally records the books on a computer chip. I've gone through about six CD players, and probably twice that many sets of headphones. Twice now I've clipped their cord while pruning (and listening) in the garden. The first time I laughed at myself, but the second time I felt, very, very stupid.

Barbara Wood lives in Woodside in an old house with three red-headed teenagers, a work-at-home husband, one full-time and one half-time dog, two bunnies, nine chickens and a fish. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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