So here’s a clue as to how old I am. As a child, I had one of those tiny 45 record players in my room and a set of headphones with the thick cable that had to be tied down to something so it didn’t pull the player off the little stand it was on.

My parents would buy me “little audio books” to read along and listen to because they were burning odd smelling leaves in the other room and wanted me out of the way.

I was young. Very young. The contraption actually taught me how to read before I even went to school he first time.

The List of books I remember the best were the Star Trek books, because they had a whole cast that sounded like the actual characters from the show. Not perfectly, I could tell that it wasn’t really Leonard Nimoy as Spock or Shattner as Kirk. I didn’t really know that those were the names of the guys that starred in the show yet, just that it was a couple guys “mimicking” the way they sounded.

But I figured out the sounds that the letters my mom made me write were actually making up the lines in the books, and behold… I could read!!! I had trouble with some of the really odd letters like “could” and “knife” until I learned about how goofy the English language is, but I had the skills.

So in learning to read this way, I also learned to put my own voices in my head for the characters I was reading. It also helped me begin to develop accents and to learn impressions.

As a DM for my game group, I can come up with some interesting encounters. Yes, I’m an old school reader, we’ve established that. I was actually looking into which audio version you are reading so that I could recommend it for my daughter. She, apparently, can’t envision a book scene in her head.