I've never really thought that much about audiobooks for myself thinking them more suitable for children, the elderly, the blind, for drivers who are regularly stuck in a traffic jam, or for when avid readers go away on a road trip and find it impossible to read without becoming nauseated.  So it was with a pleasant surprise that I discovered my first audiobook The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells on-line. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK2oPlrLdWM

It's not that I didn't have access to a book but I found the first few pages to be frustrating, maybe because of the unfamiliar British or archaic expressions and my overall difficulty to immerse myself in this rather farfetched and elaborate narrative with a rather ill-mannered protagonist. I was about to dismiss it but read the Wikipedia article on Wells, watched a documentary on Wells http://science.discovery.com/tv-shows/pop-scis-future-of/videos/h-g-well... and decided to give it a second chance, perhaps a few pages at a time.

Then I spied an Internet link that I thought might be for a film of The Invisible Man but it turned out to be an audiobook recorded by Alex Foster whose British accent complements the text very well.

The audiobook is audiovisual in that it provides the passage being read and I found myself listening and reading simultaneously.

This reminded me of a story an elderly university professor once told me about his sister going to the Globe to see a Shakespeare play performance and how she was seated next to two people who had arrived, each with a book in hand, and proceeded to read silently as the actors performed on stage, (stealing a glance now and then at the play, I hope.) After the performance was over, they got up from their seats and the professor's sister overheard them saying, "Now, wasn't that a good reading!"

It is in this spirit that I'm reading H.G. Well's The Invisible Man and, so far, it has been a great pleasure.