March 2023
Late in January 2022, I started on a journey that would change my life.
Before explaining the journey itself, you should probably know a little bit of background.
One of my all-time favorite, so-bad-it’s-good movies is The Room. If you haven’t seen it, please change that. ASAP. It’s a remarkable piece of film that everyone deserves to see, at LEAST once.
As remarkable as it is, what is equally, if not more remarkable, is the written recount of what it was like filming the movie, which is peppered with stories of meeting and befriending the film’s director, producer, and multitude-of-hats wearer, Tommy Wiseau.
Although The Disaster Artist is available as both a written book and a movie of the same title, where the story really shines is in the audiobook. Sestero does an exceptional impression of Tommy’s accent. So you can imagine that the audiobook consists of around 11 hours of hard-to-believe retellings of Tommy Wiseau's antics, spoken in a delightfully accurate Wiseau impression.
I was sucked into the audiobook within minutes of starting it, quickly making it one of my favorite experiences of the year – and the year had only just started.
With that one seemingly unlikely choice, I fell deeply in love with audiobooks.
“Okay, I get it, you ‘love’ audiobooks.” you might be saying to yourself.
No, seriously - I preach the virtues of audiobooks every. single. chance I get - with my friends and family, in the classroom, and now I have a place to - at least in part - help catalog my love for them.
The casual decision to listen to one audiobook sent me down a rabbit hole of listening to an array of books at a feverish rate. I felt like a kid again. I'd listen to audiobooks while gaming, running, doing chores, on my commutes, and most anywhere in between.
If you're someone who constantly hordes books but "never has the time to get around to reading them", please - give audiobooks a shot. And if you're looking for a place to start, consider starting with "The Disaster Artist." If nothing else, you'll probably get a few laughs out of it.
And if you do find yourself enjoying audiobooks, consider getting a subscription to Audible - OR, utilize my favorite, biggest, baddest, and best kept return-on-investment secret - your local mf'ing library.
Allow me to show my Native-New Yorker bias for a secong and humblebrag that NYC residents have it especially good. If you're a New Yorker, you can register FREE library cards for all 3 major local libraries - the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Queens Public Library. All for FREE.
I have a sprawling backlog of checked out books and holds that I'll never be able to finish. But I dutifully chip away at them one book at a time.