When Brett bought me my iPod, it came with a rebate offer: sign up at audible.com for a year, and they send you a $100 BestBuy card! This makes the $250 iPod functionally a $150 iPod, and you’ve got a bunch of books to look forward to listening to!

So I signed up at audible.com. And I downloaded some audiobooks, and got them on my iPod. It all sounds great, doesn’t it? Except for one thing: apparently, I don’t like audiobooks.

And I still have ten and a half to listen to.

I’d originally signed up at audible.com several years ago, and ran the application on my PPC. I downloaded a couple of free audiobooks (one was by the Dalai Lama, even) and I never finished listening to any of them. I couldn’t get my PPC at the time to turn off the screen so it wasn’t sucking so much battery power. And I figured I just hadn’t downloaded the right audiobooks.

I happen to read much, much faster than audiobooks are narrated. I get distracted when narrators give the same weight to plot points that they do to filler – like descriptive setup. (When I read, I tend to skim paragraphs about how the room looks or what the hero’s wearing. Not every word in a book – especially pop fiction – is as important as every other. We’re not talking LIT-rah-chuh, here.) In fact, I get so distracted that I totally quit paying attention. I keep having to rewind to see if I’ve missed anything that actually moves the plot.

I told Tahmi-who-listens-to-tons-of-audiobooks about this apparent flaw in my bookwormhood, and she told me to try mysteries. So today I’ve selected a P.G. Wodehouse (Jeeves) title and an Elizabeth Peters (Amelia Peabody) title and am trying to decide which one to buy today and which one to save for next month. I’m hoping they’re both narrated by English(wo)men, since the cute accent will probably help me pay attention.

I currently have two audiobook periodicals and about ten hours of The Devil Wears Prada taking up space on my iPod which I’ve not listened to in two months.

I have got to get my audiobook shit together!