I've discovered the joys our regional library again - here in Victoria, Australia, there's a collection of libraries across a number of towns that are all linked. If you put a book on hold that is at one library, it'll be sent down to your local. The more recent books and prize winners often have a long reserve - sometimes they don't turn up for months, and then you get a flurry of texts letting you know your books have arrived.

In the last few years, they've also gone very digital - you can view e-books and even get audio books, though I don't find the selection as extensive. I put the e-book page on my home screen of my phone for when I feel the urge to scroll when I'm in the passenger seat of the car, and read a book instead.

I had been a member of Audible for a while until I decided I just wasn't listening to it enough. I do enjoy listening to an audio book, but usually non fiction - Matthew Evans 'Soil' whilst I weeded, Merlin Sheldrake's 'Entangled Life' on a solo trip around Tasmania. I need to be either in the car or with headphones on, otherwise I'm too distracted and miss a lot as I move from room to room. I tend to listen to radio more - our national radio station, ABC Broadcasting, has some great podcasts and if you'd like some interesting short segments, I do love 'Conversations' with Richard Fidlar - this one about shark attack victims, and this one about seaweed are two I've bookmarked to listen to soon.

I did listen to Phillip K Dick's 'Ubik' recently on audio. The voices were fantastic and it was absolutely hilarious. If you're into old school wierd sci fi and mind trips, this is definitely for you.

Thing is though, I just can't go past a paper book.

I find it sad that no one does reference books as much anymore - you can find all you need on the internet, but there's so much to be said for thumbing through a book on mushrooms or how to build an earth oven or landscape design. We have a beautiful collection I can't get rid of, but I don't buy more as I'm a sucker for a quick look up on Google.

But books still hold a central place in my life. They're more tactile, more connected to memory to me - lazy Christmas afternoons with a new pile of books gifted by my parents (I still have Marquez's 'Of Love and Other Demons' because it's inscribed by them) staying up past 2 am reading 'Flowers in the Attic' under the doona because I wasn't allowed to, sunbaking in Western Australia somewhere reading Isabel Allende's 'House of the Spirits', on a train in eastern Europe reading Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' or in Portugal with Saramego's 'Blindess', curled up in front of the fire reading 'Narrow Road to the Deep North', in the back of the Land Rover reading Ranulph Fiennes 'To the End of the Earth' - that great adventurer, a rare breed when adventure was less tik tokked and more real.

There's something very visceral about books you can touch and smell and feel, in a good way. I have so many memories of discovery in bookshops - huge book barns, little antique shops, phone boxes, and now roadside book libaries scattered through town where we dump books and pick them up. Books gifted in love. Coming up with a haul of travel books for Jamie. Falling in love with him because of his bookshelf in his truck - a mix of Buddhist texts, Stephen King, Russian literature, books on physics, and so on.

Currently I'm enjoying this book from the library - in fact, I should get off the bloody internet and get some dedicated reading time in. It's very well written, by an Iranian-American poet, whose main charater is an Iranian-American poet - a young man, searching for meaning in his life. His mother died in an infamous 1988 air disaster, when a US missile cruiser mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in the final months of the Iran-Iraq war, leaving him with a traumatic past he's trying to reconcile as a recovering addict who's not doing the best job of recovering. There's some really interesting imaginative dream chapters where he imagines conversations with Trump, Lisa Simpson and even the Persian poet Rumi. Some say it's a little emo ie emotional, but I don't find it that way - sure, it's introspective, but it's definitely not the 'poor me' fest of 'A Little Life' which I found intolerable trauma porn and had to put down in disgust.

In a

**This post was written in response to Hive account@galenkp's QOTW - I chose this question: 'would you rather read a book or listen to one as an audio book and why?' Bonus points for telling us about what type of books you like to read or listen to and why.