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How many books do you read per month nowadays?

Two? One? Half a book?

If you’re a busy professional, perhaps not even that?

I’ve always found reading to be an essential part of personal development. Not blogs – I mean the normal, in-depth, catch every word – not just the headlines – reading .

Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed how my shelves started getting full of books I had no idea when I’d come around to read. Business books, fiction, language books, you name it …

Looming over me like a very pronounced shadow of outdated aspirations.

But why do I read less?

I suppose partly due to the standard reasons that we all face – apart from the apparent busyness, it’s ever-shifting interests and professional pressures that are making it increasingly hard to sit down and dive into one of the classics that you’ve always felt bad about not having read.

Like War And Peace, or Crime and Punishment, Bhagavad Gita, the Qu’ran, or even Cryptonomicon.

Another undisputable factor is the change in the way we read. This article captures it well.

We’re far less experiencing but rather processing written content – one of the tools our minds use to help us survive the information overdose.

But let’s back to the initial problem – sitting down, opening a book, focusing and doing nothing else for about 10 hours.

Quite rare in my current life.

So – about 2 years ago, I switched to audio books. I got one of those subscriptions at Audible and since then, not one month has passed without an epic story, historical drama, marketing advice or similar.

I run about every other day for 20-40 minutes, which makes a bit less than 8 hours per month, and I’m in the car at least 8 hours per month.

About a thousand hours per year that could potentially be wasted.

The dramatized version of War And Peace is about 9 hours long (the unabridged version is 65 hours ), so this is just about right for 1 audio book per month without any significant change to my daily routine.

This means min. 1 book in the busiest months and about 2-3 on average – not perfect but more than satisfactory for the current pace of life.

What about recommendations?

I’ve recommended business books before, so here are two magnificent works of fiction, both about young girls in dire circumstances.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – a stunningly tragic and epic account of a young girl’s life in Afghanistan during the recent wars

The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson’s epic sci-fi drama about a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer – a great read or listen, almost as good as Snow Crash

Of course there is more to a podcast than just words turned into audio (as you can clearly discover by listening to these fine examples) -

but Odiogo does a very good job of creating MP3 versions of your blog posts and posting them for your readers to play – either on the website itself or as a podcast on their iPods (or similar devices).

I waste far less time going through my podcasts while jogging or driving than reading through the rest of the RSS feeds I subscribe to, therefore I’d love to see this feature on other blogs as well.

If you click on listen now on top of this post, you’ll hear what it sounds like.

The text-to-speech conversion is quite good (with very few blunders) with a relatively natural flow and a pleasant voice you (hopefully) won’t get tired of very quickly.

However, as I often post videos of interesting lectures or presentations here, I’d also love it if Odiogo could insert the audio from these videos into the podcast (and not skip them over like any other graphic element).

I accept that this is not a trivial job (and it would definitely require a lot more CPU power and temporary storage), but it would still make life significantly easier .

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In the past couple of years, I have stumbled upon a series of useful podcasts I listen to more or less regularly.

Below is a list of the ones I have found most useful.

1. Technology

• Hanselminutes - a great software development podcast by Scott Hanselman (focusing on MS technologies)
• TWiT - This Week In Tech – fun and informative weekly updates on what’s new in the tech world (by Leo Laporte & co.)
• Net@Nite – web tech updates by Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte
• SecurityNow - IT security by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte
• Ruby on Rails Podcast

2. Entrepreneurship

• Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders - Stanford Technology Ventures Program
• Iinnovate - about innovation and entrepreneurship

3. Language

• ChinesePod - great podcast for learning Mandarin
• Notes In Spanish (intermediate, advanced)
• P4 Klartext – daily news in clear and easily understandable Swedish
• The French Pod Class
• Selkouutiset - simple Finnish podcast
• Montaigne’s Tower – Steve Kaufmann’s podcast on language learning

4. Science

• Science Friday – great podcast about science
• Brain Food – easy listening, scientific facts

5. Miscellaneous

• TEDTalks - talks fom the TED conference – a must-have
• Manager Tools – great tips on managerial practices
• Princeton University Podcast 2006
• YALE University Podcast
• Visual Culture
• Futures in Biotech

Thanks to David for some of these links .