I am going to be doing a road trip here very shortly from AZ back to TX, with lotsa long stretches of desert highway & I thought Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop, a classic set in NM (on Time Mag's 100 All-time Best Eng. language Novels) which I'd read years ago & thought might be nice to listen to while traipsing through that landscape.
Alas, I can't find it in audio format anywhere, but Cather's My Antonia & O Pioneers are available evidently.They won't work for me (set in Nebraska) but maybe it might be fun for you to take a 'mind vacation' out that way while you recuperate.
I know that my favorite novels have always been the ones that transport me to somewhere else. I think it might be interesting to find out if listening to a novel is as visually evocative in the 'eyes' of the imagination as reading usually is (for me, reading can be quite vivid in my mind's eye), as I suspect the words are filtered through a different part of the brain. In fact, for that very reason I'm now going to see today if I can track down Gabriela Garcia-Marquez's "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in mp3 for my road trip - that novel's set a bit further south, but it's also probably the most visually evocative book I've ever read & I'm curious to see if listening to it instead will have the same transporting effect.
You might run through that Time list linked above. Yes it's Time, but there really are some great ones on their top 100.
Hope you feel better & I hope your folks are feeling better about the prospect of your surgery.
typo= s/b Gabriel (no a) garcia Marquez for above.
Oh wow, thank you, Leilani!
That is a great suggestion. :)