Whoa-ho-holy audiobooks! Let me tell you about the reading hack that changed my life. And you can try it for free. (I’ll get to that in a bit.)

I started listening to audiobooks heavily a couple of years ago, and I’ve roughly quadrupled the number of books I read in a year — from something like 50 books a year to over 200.

My trick? I speed up the narrators.

See, they read too slowly for my frantic brain, but the Audible app lets me crank ’em up a little without chipmunking the voices. I just dial them in to the speed of my thoughts. It’s the best.

I listen every day, and I really love it. Of course I still do quite a bit of eyeball reading as well. Still gotta have my paperbacks, Kindle books, malevolent tomes, and arcane scrolls, naturally. What I’ve noticed is that the more I listen, the more I also read the old-fashioned way.

I used to think that I’d never get through all the books I want to read in my life, but thanks to audio, it’s starting to seem possible. When I started my audiobook journey 20 or so months ago, I had about 30 Stephen King books to get through. Now I’m down to 4. Getting kind of nervous. What happens when I run out?

We’ve got a big audiobook announcement of our own to make here soon — about 38 hours big — but that’s still simmering in the ol’ audio crockpot, so you’ll have to wait.

In the meantime, I wanted to tell you about how you can try out audiobooks for free. It’s simple. You just follow one of the links below, and Audible will let you listen to a freebie when you sign up for a 30-day trial. You can cancel at any time with no risk. They’re hoping, of course, that you’ll get hooked like I did. You probably will. Gladly.

Join the audiobook cult with me. Pick your freebie here: