Back in high school, I hated (almost) everything we were assigned to read. To me, they were all boring books that were written a hundred years ago that had nothing to do with my life. Though I was retaught some of them in college and actually like them now, like The Great Gatsby, I sadly still have little patience for anything written before my lifetime. However, I discovered in high school something that made reading all of those books bearable—audiobooks.

I would get the texts on CD from the library and listen as I drove to and from school. It was so easy to fly through the day’s reading assignment by doing this, and it made the books even kind of interesting. It was nice to have a story be read aloud to me, like a parent tucking you into bed.

I then went to college and, being an English major, lost all time to read what I actually wanted to read. My days were filled with the dozens of assigned texts I had to read for my classes. And being forced to read all of these books made me lose my love for reading.

When I graduated I rediscovered my love after realizing how much time I now had to read. It’s been almost two years since I’ve graduated, and I’ve read 102 novels. But I think that the number will be much higher for the coming years, as I have also rediscovered my love of audiobooks.

It started with a book that I found difficult to read in print but that I loved the concept of—Need, by Joelle Charbonneau. I enjoyed reading The Testing trilogy by Charbonneau, so when I saw her new book was about the dangers of social media, I had to pick it up. I gave up after about fifty pages though, as I felt it wasn’t smooth on the page. But then a few months later I found the audiobook version at my library, and I gave it another try. And I am so glad I did.

Just like those books in high school, listening to the audiobook made the story so much more interesting and easy to get through. And this story was so worth it, because it ended up being an incredible book about how social media can make teenagers do things they would not do without the anonymity of the Internet and make them complete seemingly random and secretly dangerous tasks with the promise of a material reward.

After falling in love with audiobooks again, I discovered an app that my library lets you use for free—called Hoopla—that has tons of audiobooks on it. And the best part is that you can listen to them at varying speeds. I like to listen at 1.5x normal speed, so I can get through books quickly. And I love that it is on my Kindle and phone, so that I can listen as I get ready in the morning instead of having to use a CD player or just listen in the car.

So I encourage you, if you have trouble getting into books or even finding the time to read, try audiobooks. It is really interesting to have a novel read aloud to you, and doing so makes it so much easier to fit reading into your day.