Why Reading with Jimmy Is Better Than Audiobooks
An audiobook reads to you. Jimmy reads with you. That’s not a small difference. When you listen to a narration, you follow someone else’s pace, someone else’s emphasis, someone else’s interpretation — without ever seeing the words on the page. Here, you see the text. You examine it. You discover what it means for yourself. And when the reading is done, the analysis begins. Jimmy takes every work apart — language, structure, character, meaning — because appreciation is the goal, not just exposure. No audiobook takes you there like Jimmy.
The Problem: Understanding versus appreciation
- There’s a big difference between understanding and appreciation.
- You can understand something and not appreciate it, but you can never appreciate anything without understanding it.
- Appreciation takes time. Imagination. And knowledge.
- “The more you look, the more you see. The more you see, the better you know where to look.”
- This website was created to help you appreciate literature, which is language charged with meaning as Ezra Pound said.
Our Plan
- Jimmy will read only classics – to find out how other people lead their lives in order how to lead our own.
- Each novel or story will be read entirely. Then, it will be analyzed.
- The analysis of literature is how you develop appreciation, not just understanding.
- The joy of language is that it should be read aloud.
- So welcome! Explore… and email your comments and questions to [email protected].
Jimmy is Jim Nowakowski.
Jim has spent more than thirty years as a business strategist, speaker, and author — presenting complex ideas to architects, designers, and business leaders across the country. He holds an M.A. in English from DePaul University and spent a decade teaching before building his company. But the classroom never really left him. ReadingWithJimmy.com is where those two lives — the strategist and the teacher — come together. Jim believes the classics exist for one reason: to show us how other people lead their lives so we can lead our own. That’s why he reads every work in its entirety, analyzes it in depth, and does it all out loud — because language, as Ezra Pound said, is charged with meaning, and meaning deserves to be heard. Whether you found Jimmy through Shakespeare, Sun Tzu, or a short story by Cheever, you’re in the right place. Pull up a chair. The reading is about to begin.