Why YSK: if you don’t have the ability or time to devote your visual attention to reading, you can still engage your mind the same way as you do while reading by listening to an audiobook. Virtually any modern audiobook player will also let you select the play speed, so you can listen to books at whatever rate you’re comfortable with.
Personally I know as I’ve gotten older the number of hours I’m physically able to read tends to no longer be able to match my desire to read, so it’s nice to be able to keep going even if my eyes are sore.
Historically, this is somewhat analogous to the late 19th century lectors that worked in some factories, paid by donated workers’ wages, to read/perform popular books for bored workers. Predictably in the US factory owners tended to have a problem with their workers listening to ‘communist literature,’ leading to firings, strikes, and violent crackdowns.
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Others have said it, but definitely speed them up. I used to have the same complaint, but now I keep it at 1.25x and adjust from there.
Depending on the book, I usually read at 1.4x or up to 2x if I’ve already read it.
Speed them up.
I run all of my audiobooks at 1.25x speed as a bare minimum. If a narrator is particularly slow, sometimes I’ll even bump it up as high as 2x. Any half-decent audiobook player will have built-in speed controls.
For instance, if you’re running AudioBookShelf for self-hosting your audiobooks, Plappa (an unofficial but very well done listening app that syncs to your server) has it right there on the bottom:
On my particular color scheme it is purple, but you can change that in the settings. You can also set things like auto-pause (after {x} time, at the end of the chapter, or at the end of the next chapter), and bookmarks (which you can label) to come back to later.