It’s a problem of long standing: what do you do when you’re doing something else—I mean driving, biking, cooking, washing dishes? What do you do, in other words, when your body is occupied with a task but only a portion of your brain? Music has long provided an answer. Music, however, is often pushed into the background of an overactive monkey mind. Recorded books can work, I find, but the prose has to be calibrated just right, compelling but not so dense as to require backing up and rereading. That’s a narrow sweet spot. Most of the books I want Read more