My audiobooks project is ready to roll. I’ve just completed two stages of preparation and am launching a full year of exhilarating listening.
The first stage was conceptual: investigating whether audiobooks could offer a sustainable workaround to reading printed books. Intensified lighting and magnifying devices gave temporary relief from my visual impairment. But print was fatiguing and often illegible. Making connection with Sacramento’s Braille and Talking Book Library confirmed that audiobooks could be my main solution. BTBL had a friendly, professional staff and a field-proven system for complimentary lending of recordings. Their regularly replenished collection of 150,000 audio titles made clear they could satisfy my borrowing requests.

A trial run suggested I could listen to an average of one audio recording per average week, about 50 per year with periodic pauses. While I hoped to sustain my enthusiasm into the indefinite future, I’d start with a single-year timeframe.

So that brought me to the second preparation challenge: what categories of audiobooks did I most want to read and where could I find recommended titles? With a targeted bookshelf of only 50 total books, I decided to limit my search to prose works, excluding poetry and drama. Top-quality writing was a prerequisite. I definitely wanted to revisit literary classics, but I also wanted to sample prize-winning recent works. Fiction was my favorite genre, celebrating writing as an art form. But I also aimed to include non-fiction, for some in-depth analyses of politics, economics, science and current affairs.

This account of my searches for recommendations and selections will necessarily contain a number of lists. My late-in-life hunt began with a return to early adulthood.