Two great tastes that do not taste great together

Every once in a while I try audiobooks again and find out, all over again, that they are not for me. This is very odd, because I love podcasts and I love books.

One of the things I like about podcasts is that I can stare at a blank page in my sketchbook draw while listening to them. This is, you may notice, something that ought to also apply to audiobooks! And yet.

I have so many books I want to read -- and that's the thing. I want to read, not listen to them. Part of it is that I can read much, much faster than I can listen (even with speeding up, I'd needsomething around x5 to match reading speed), part of it is that I tend to zone out when only one person is speaking (I cannot do mono-voice podcasts either) and in HUGE part because listening just takes up a different part of my brain than eye-reading does. It literally feels different in my head: listening is an acute spot on the right side while reading is more diffuse towards the back.

I managed to put this into words when I was reading Lou Lubie's Racines (Roots). It has a few sentences of in Réunion Creole and Réunion Créole is close enough to French that it's mostly understandable if you sound out the words (the book has translation footnotes, I just like to practice reading Créole lol). So I stopped reading and sounded the words out in my head, which felt like shifting gears in a car, and suddenly I was listening to myself reading outloud in my head instead of eye-reading, if that makes sense.

Does eye-reading feel like ear-reading to you? Do you prefer one over the other?