Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Sarah Clinton-McCausland, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Open Education Librarian at the University of Maryland.
I never thought I’d lose my leisure reading habit. Leisure reading, pleasure reading, or “free voluntary reading” is “reading because you want to… [P]utting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead” (Krashen, 2004, p. x). Growing up, it was also my favorite activity in the world.
For people who like to read, reading is fun—more specifically, it is cognitively complex, immersive, energizing, embodied, and grounding. It’s a kind of play that takes place within a relatively safe container, balancing flow and emotional regulation, escape and connection, uncertainty and exploration. Allowed to read whatever I wanted throughout my childhood and adolescence, I checked out stacks of books from the public library and pulled intriguing, probably-age-inappropriate titles off my parents’ shelves. Each new book set me down in a world of unfamiliar people and occurrences, generating a hungry curiosity that propelled me forward. Reading allowed me to contextualize my own experiences and learn more about my likes and dislikes, deeply shaping my sense of self. I always preferred “visual reading”—print paper books, and later, the occasional eBook—but when it came to genre, I craved variety.
Then I started college—a time of personal growth and intellectual demand. I learned how to read and analyze theoretical texts purposively for a grade, but this process—combined with a newly expanded social life—gradually shifted me away from leisure reading. In the years after graduation, I would come home drained from my office jobs and crash in front of the Netflix subscription I could finally afford. I got through a handful of visual books per year, but the process had become a slog. No matter the book, my attention would drift, nagged by an endless to-do list of chores and obligations. Discouraged, I’d return books to the library half-finished. I had quietly lost my reading habit, but I didn’t fully understand why.
A few years later, midway through my MLIS, I sought answers through a class project. I conducted qualitative research with twelve Millennials who identified as lapsed avid leisure readers. Many of them had grown up in middle-class U.S. households and attended college, but all had developed more complicated relationships to their leisure time in adulthood, which impacted their media habits. Participants reported that “getting into” a book was the biggest barrier to regaining a habit, but it helped to choose reading material that was purely for fun. Others met their need for narrative story by listening to podcasts and audiobooks or reading more long-form articles on their phones, all of which slotted more easily into the shorter pockets of transitional, unstructured time available throughout the day.
Free voluntary reading can be a powerful expression of what bell hooks (1994) and Paulo Freire (1970) term “the practice of freedom.” Once we’ve learned how to read, we can engage in the serendipity that reading engenders for the rest of our lives, reminding ourselves over and over that we are malleable and can dream beyond our current contexts. But there are many dominant cultural forces in the U.S. which discourage exactly this kind of visionary play. We know the form this takes in 2026: literal book bans; the monetization of our attention; rising living costs; the demand that we continuously optimize our time and energy toward paid work and quantifiable self-improvement. And of course we also face the extraction of our labor and creativity via generative AI, while we’re simultaneously told that genAI will render that same labor and creativity obsolete. After college, my study participants and I were plunged more deeply into the demands of a semi-post-recession labor market, and things have only gotten weirder since then. Everyone I encounter is stressed and overscheduled at best. In times like these, reading can be an especially powerful balm—a ladder in our survival toolkits. But it can also be harder to read when so much is happening.
My study participants’ stories echoed my own, but while they made me feel less alone, they still weren’t enough to kickstart me back into reading. Paradoxically, because I’d started to consider reading something that was “good for me” and morally superior to other leisure activities, it had morphed into another means of optimization. I had a narrow vision of “ideal” leisure reading as a disciplined, meditative, phone-free hour with a print book each night before bed. So I felt ashamed when reality fell short of my expectations: Why can’t I read anymore?? How come all I do is watch TV? It’s so embarrassing that I’m a librarian who doesn’t read! It took me a long time to understand that my perfectionism around my reading practices erased both my hunger to read habitually and the potential benefits.
Unlike many of my study participants, though, I didn’t consider audiobooks a suitable alternative. The same white supremacist culture which prizes optimization tends to value written over oral language, and steeped in that culture, I’d come to believe that listening to audiobooks wasn’t quite “real” reading—and also that I just wasn’t an audiobook person. The deeper truth: I was scared I wasn’t actually capable of listening to audiobooks. My education and career have always rewarded my visual reading skills. Having both my sight and hearing (and a love for music and podcasts) made it easier to spend years ignoring how much I struggled to follow linear narratives in audio. My brain tends to slip around and chase other thoughts without printed text or images to ground it.
Still, it was obvious that audiobooks had the huge advantage of letting me do other things while reading. In theory, I could visually read much faster than I could listen to someone else reading, but I slowly came to acknowledge that it might be worth trying to read in my nonpreferred modality if the alternative was not really reading at all. Halfway through 2023, I checked out my first audiobook: a literary mystery-thriller by a favorite author I’d only read in print before. I raced through it in a few days and immediately borrowed another one.
I quickly confirmed that audiobooks’ affordances allowed them to fit into the interstitial, transitional times in my schedule, making chores more tolerable while letting me get into a book more easily. I started delving into books that had sat on my list for years, rediscovering the joy of reading only what I wanted to and abandoning anything that felt like just a “should.” I slowly became more comfortable with the affordances of audiobooks, and they’re now the first format I reach for when leisure reading. In other words, I think I’ve developed “audiobook literacy.”
I am still simply not as adept with aural media as visual, though, and probably never will be. In the past few years, I’ve gently observed my experiences, trying different strategies to accommodate and scaffold my audio reading needs. Now, for most books, I’ll try to obtain the print or eBook version at the same time so I can refer back to it periodically. (Sometimes a text-only book will convey additional layers of meaning through font and text formatting, making the book “sound” different when read visually. If I can’t get the print version of a given book, however, I have to just accept that it’s OK to get a different variation of the experience!) For literature with more characters or complex plots, I’ll also enhance my comprehension by taking notes and making family trees, timelines, or other diagrams by hand. (I love a sweeping multigenerational family saga—and a diagram!) I finally got through Wuthering Heights in audio this year by referring to the Project Gutenberg eBook and creating a chaotic but extremely helpful family tree based on the Wikipedia entry.
The more audiobooks I’ve read, the more I’ve finally embraced the reality that listening to audiobooks is reading. Recent research has started confirming what audiobookworms have known all along: a 2019 study, for instance, found that “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical” (Deniz et al., p. 7722). Our brains paint similar pictures regardless of modality.
That said, I still find that print and audio produce different reading experiences, and releasing my reading perfectionism has been a whole accommodation strategy in itself! I have a better time when I approach an audiobook knowing the experience won’t be exactly the same, and not expecting myself to “succeed” in audio the same way I can in print. I’ve developed more patience for my need to replay the same passages multiple times after spacing out, more tolerance for the vocal dissonance between my own internal narrator and the audiobook’s. I’ve learned I actually prefer some books in audio, especially thrillers, memoirs, and author-read titles. I enjoy giving my eyes a break and practicing my close listening skills. Sometimes I even remember audiobooks better than their visual counterparts, maybe because I have to work harder for them.
I’ve also learned that print and audio are fundamentally complementary. When I engage with a book in one format, I’m more likely to engage with the other—maybe even switching off depending on my mood. Learning to be curious and flexible about format—not just genre—has allowed me to take advantage of the affordances of audio, making reading a joyful and rewarding experience again.
Developing audiobook literacy has unexpectedly impacted my work as a subject liaison librarian in various ways, too. I’ve come to see leisure reading practices as a powerful way to develop transferable information literacy skills. They can teach us more about information contexts and affordances; show us new ways to navigate our own and others’ access needs; and help us reenvision inequitable systems. In reference and instruction interactions, I’ve started demonstrating how to access sources in different formats by default (e.g., “this database also lets you listen to journal articles in audio”), and I highlight library accessibility services in resource lists. My own experiences remind me that media format preferences are deeply individual, and disability status and access needs are complex and constantly shifting. I can’t ever assume where someone else locates themselves along those spectrums, especially because they may have very good reasons for not telling me or the institution.
I’ve also deepened my commitment to promoting play and leisure for their own sake. I suggest students pursue the projects that most spark their curiosity and interest, but I also encourage them to carve out leisure time outside of school and work whenever possible. As an icebreaker, I sometimes ask students to share any piece of leisure media they’ve enjoyed recently, emphasizing the validity of all formats. I’ll also disclose my own preferences and access challenges when appropriate. This can segue into conversations about accessibility, platformization, and the pros and cons of different formats in context—all applicable to scholarship, too.
My own information literacy skills (and institutional affiliation) also make it easier to access leisure reading materials. I usually get audiobooks and eBooks from my public library via Libby, but I occasionally buy them from Libro.fm or check LibriVox for public domain titles. I borrow print books from my workplace (including via interlibrary loan) or the public library, access public domain titles via Project Gutenberg, and sometimes purchase from Thriftbooks.com or Bookshop.org. I want to support students in developing a similar sense of information abundance and more pathways for meeting their leisure needs even after graduation, so in orientations, I talk about how public and academic libraries complement each other, and I explicitly promote our local public libraries as major sources for leisure reading and learning. Students aren’t always aware that they can get a public library card for free and access more “fun” books in print, audio, and eBook forms. In this current moment, it also feels good to help spawn more lifelong public library and local bookstore patrons!
Few things feel more essential right now than leisure and play, and activities like leisure reading can bring a deeper sense of meaningfulness to our lives in a way that job skills on their own don’t necessarily. By becoming an audiobook reader and developing a new literacy, I’ve been able to tap into this feeling more than I have in years, and I’m endlessly grateful that I was able to release my format perfectionism and regain one of my favorite things to do. I’m excited to keep exploring how to center play, leisure, and reading in my life and librarianship.
References
Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(39), 7722-7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Krashen, Stephen. 2004. The power of reading: Insights from the research. Libraries Unlimited.