Wednesday 9 March 2016

Falling in love with Podcasts

I'm sure I've mentioned the fact that I'm driving a lot at the moment, between 3 and 6 hours a day to get to and from work. I am holding out hope this will reduce once I've finished training and I am on my own patch drumming up business. 

There are a few things that have made my drive more bearable, the first is Audible. I signed up to a 3 month free trial to their audiobooks and the one's that I've heard have been fantastic. They are literally someone reading an unabridged book to you, not like the audiobooks I had on tape as a child where the BBC seemed to act out a play on stage and you got a lot of inaudible or 'hammed up' rubbish.  It is relatively expensive though after the free trial as you can only download one book a month from them with your monthly subscription charge.

The other programmes I've listened to for hours are  podcasts. My favourites are History extra podcast, which is a UK history magazine. They have loads of historians and writers being interviewed and it is a more traditional type of history, broad subjects and famous events. They focus a bit more on British history, although not at all exclusively. 

The other one that I really enjoy is 'stuff you missed in history class', by howstuffworks.com. That's an American programme, it had more obscure events, but things you've probably not heard as much about which makes it really interesting and the presentation style is different to history extra. It has two regular hosts who research an event or person and talk all about it. They tend to focus slightly more on US history, although like history extra they too talk about non-US events. If anything this is my favourite of the two.

Anyway, if anyone spends lots of time in the car or in a workshop etc, they're both fascinating and will make the time fly.

Any suggestions for new podcasts are appreciated, at the rate I'm going I'll be through both back catalogues in no time!

5 comments:

  1. Have you looked on Amazon for audio books there is loads for free instant download, I like audio books for long journeys, I also like to listen to R4 on journeys they have some really good plays, they have free podcasts on there site too

    ReplyDelete
  2. I listen to thesurvivalpodcast.com daily, just started listening to http://www.homegrownliberty.com/category/homegrown-liberty-podcast/ too, lots of good ideas

    ReplyDelete
  3. i think my kindle can read to me?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've got some books I've downloaded which I think I can send to you. I'll have to check.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Audio books and podcasts are great! Dan drives a big truck for a living so he's behind the wheel a lot (too much in his opinion), but the audio books and podcasts are a life saver. Especially since the radio has terrible programming!

    ReplyDelete