I bought my first iPod about a year ago and I'm an addict.

I love listening to my favorite soundtracks as I write, so I've loaded all of them on the iPod, along with some Springsteen, some meditation music, and chants by Krishna Das. But most of all, I love listening to books. The iPod is a little dicey when listening to books, because if you accidentally hit the scroll thingy in the wrong spot, you may be propelled five or ten or one hundred pages forward or backward with no real way of knowing exactly where you've landed. That's the only snag I've found. . . except for the problem of reading in bed.

Like many readers, I enjoy reading before sleep. You know how it is: you open the book, read a few pages or a few chapters, grow sleepy, close the book and turn out the light. With an audio book, though, I find that I fall asleep with the book still running. It's so frustrating to wake up and have no idea where I am in the story. So I've decided to cool it on listening to audio books in bed. I think it ruins the book for me.

The thing I love best about an audio book is the performance, which can absolutely make or break the book. My all-time favorite audio book performance is the unabridged version of The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Now I have a close second: The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff. I'm eating this book up. It's so hard to know if I'd love it as much if I were actually reading it, but the four actors performing the various voices in the story are phenomenal. For those of you who don't know, The 19th Wife is a sweeping (fictional) look at the early days of The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints and its contemporary spin-off, the "Firsts". From Publishers Weekly "This exquisite tour de force explores the dark roots of polygamy and its modern-day fruit in a renegade cult..." It's yummy! But I don't dare read it in bed.

Do any of you successfully listen to audio books before sleep?