I soon graduated to listening as I cooked, cleaned house, ran errands, worked out and, of course, drove. I first turned to audiobooks because I get motion sickness from reading in cars, buses and other moving vehicles.

Here's a modest proposal: Try listening to it instead. 'Moby-Dick' the novel becomes almost as elusive as the white whale himself. Too often, these grand plans end in shirking and a vague sense of failure. Others honestly believe that a 900-page Russian novel that seemed too daunting a prospect in November will somehow be easier to scale in a hammock. For some, this is the intellectual equivalent of using a week of paid vacation to finish a big household project, like installing a patio. Many people swear that, come summer, they'll finally get around to reading a classic work of literature they missed during their student years 'War and Peace' is a perennial candidate. After all, isn't he supposed to be on vacation? The handful of times he has summoned the discipline to try, he found himself falling asleep or swiping a friend's copy of the latest Michael Connelly mystery instead. Yet once he nestles into his seat on the plane or flops down on the grass in the sun, he just can't bring himself to crack open that hefty chunk of 20th-century German bildungsroman.

A friend of mine has been vowing to read Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain' every summer for the past several years.

For mac instal War and Peace