The Art of Reading

The Triple Immersion: Why I Read and Listen at the Same Time

By a Voracious Reader, Podcaster, and Accidental Bibliophile

I have been reading since I was three years old. Not because anyone pushed me toward it, but largely because nobody thought to tell me I couldn't. That early start set the tone for a life defined by books - and after eighteen years of hosting a podcast, that life has become wonderfully, overwhelmingly bookish.

The gifts have been extraordinary. Thousands of them. Every guest who sits across from me (or, in recent years, appears on my screen) often arrives bearing the thing they've spent years of their life creating: their book. I take that seriously. Every single one gets read. Every one gets a review - on Amazon, on Goodreads, on my blog. It's the least I can do for someone who trusted me with their ideas for an hour.

But somewhere along the way, I discovered something that changed how I experience books entirely.

Three Rivers, One Current

I didn't invent this method in some flash of inspiration. I stumbled into it through frustration.

Years ago I picked up Brendon Burchard's The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive. I had long admired Brendon - his energy, his generosity, his gift for making complex ideas about human potential feel immediately actionable. So it genuinely bothered me when I found I couldn't get through it. Not because the book wasn't good. But something wasn't clicking on the page alone, and I kept stalling before the end. For someone who has finished virtually every book they've ever started, that nagged at me.

Then I found the Audible version - and everything changed.

I knew Brendon's voice from his work. And listening closely, especially in those early chapters, I could hear something the page had never told me: he was nervous. There was a tentativeness in the opening, a slight formality, the way anyone sounds when they're acutely aware that this is the permanent record. But as the book progressed, something shifted. He found his stride. The voice relaxed into the person I recognized - warm, human, deeply invested in the reader's life. By the end I understood not just what the book was saying, but who had written it, and why it mattered to him.

That experience changed how I read everything that came after.

Whenever a guest's book is available on Audible, I download it. I also get it on Kindle. Then I do something that surprises people when I describe it: I sit down with the physical book open in front of me, the Kindle beside it, and listen to the author read it aloud while I follow along across all three.

Physical book. Kindle book. Audible. Simultaneously.

This is not multitasking. It is the opposite of multitasking. It is, if anything, a kind of radical single-tasking - three channels of input converging on the same story, the same argument, the same prose, at the same moment. Each format does something the others cannot. The physical book invites annotation, the weight of it in your hands a constant reminder that someone spent years filling these pages. The Kindle lets you search, highlight, and carry every underlined passage with you forever. And the audio - the author's own voice - unlocks the one thing neither printed format can provide: intention delivered in real time.

The words on the page stop being silent. They acquire a voice - the author's voice - and suddenly you understand something about pacing, emphasis, and intention that no amount of solo reading could deliver. A sentence you might have skimmed becomes a sentence you cannot unhear.

What Science Suggests (and What My Gut Confirms)

Researchers who study reading and cognition have found that combining visual text with audio narration can enhance comprehension and retention, particularly for complex or dense material. The dual-coding theory - the idea that our brains process verbal and visual information through separate but complementary systems - offers one explanation. When both channels receive the same information simultaneously, the encoding runs deeper.

But I didn't arrive at this practice through research papers. I arrived at it through instinct, and a mild obsession with doing justice to the people who gave me their books.

What I've noticed, over years of this practice:

You catch what you'd otherwise miss. A lone reader's eyes can slide over a passage. A lone listener can let their mind drift during a chapter. When you're doing all three at once, there is no escape hatch. The text keeps your eyes honest; the voice keeps your attention tethered; and the Kindle keeps a permanent, searchable record of every passage that stopped you.

You hear the author's intent. Writers know what they mean. When they narrate their own work, the emphasis is never accidental. A slight pause before a key word. A drop in register during a vulnerable passage. A quickening when the argument builds toward its conclusion. These are interpretive gifts that the page alone cannot give you.

You read faster - and slower - in exactly the right places. Audio sets a pace, but your eyes remain free. You can linger on a sentence in the physical book, pull up a search on the Kindle, trace a footnote, while the voice continues its measured progress. The three inputs create a productive friction that keeps you present.

Each format earns its place. The physical book is where I live with sticky notes - dozens of them, flagging passages, marking pages, recording reactions, without a single mark ever touching the book itself. (A childhood librarian with a ruler saw to that particular habit permanently.) The Kindle is where I build a permanent, searchable record of every passage that stopped me - highlights I can return to long after the book is shelved. And the audio is the interpretive layer that neither print format can replicate: the author's own cadence, emphasis, and emotional register, reading their words back to you.

The Podcast Dimension

There is a particular intimacy to this practice when the narrator is someone I've interviewed.

I know how they laugh. I've heard them get animated when pressed on an idea, or careful when the subject is tender. So when I listen to them read their own book, I am not hearing a stranger. I am hearing the extended version of a conversation we already had. The book becomes the thing they were trying to say before the microphone was on, the thing they spent years arranging precisely so it could land just right.

Reading along - in two formats at once - while they speak it back to me: that is as close as I can get to understanding someone's full creative intention. It is an act of respect I recommend without reservation.

The Practical Reality of Thousands of Books

Almost nineteen years. Thousands of guests. Thousands of books.

People sometimes ask how I manage it. The honest answer is: I love it, and I have built a life around making time for it. The triple-format method is part of that infrastructure. It is not a shortcut - if anything, it demands more concentration than any single approach. But it is efficient in a deeper sense: I come away from a book having truly inhabited it, not merely processed it.

For nonfiction - which makes up a significant portion of the gifts I receive - this method is particularly powerful. An author explaining a framework they've developed, a researcher presenting findings they believe in, a practitioner describing a craft they've spent decades mastering: all of them benefit from being heard and read, in hand and on screen. The argument lives in the structure of the prose; the conviction lives in the voice. You need all of it to understand what someone is really saying.

An Invitation

If you are a reader who has never tried this, I'd encourage you to start with a book whose author narrates their own audiobook. Not a celebrity narrator, however talented. The author themselves. Download the Audible. Get the Kindle. And if you can, hold the physical book in your hands. Open to page one. Press play.

Give it a chapter. Notice what changes.

You have been reading words all your life. This is the first time you'll hear what they were always trying to sound like.

Read voraciously. Listen carefully. Do both - all three - at once whenever