When Briggitte Suastegui heard about Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey, she wanted to go back to its source material. She decided to start reading The Iliad first but had trouble getting through it.
Suastegui's friend had a suggestion for her: Why not try the audiobook?
"He was like, 'Well, you know the oral tradition of epic poems, right?'" Suastegui remembered. "'Originally these things were shared down and passed down orally.'"
But Suastegui, 29, said she often lost her place while listening. So she took it a step further: She tried reading a physical copy of The Iliad and listening to the audiobook version at the same time.
"And that got me through the book," she said. "I was super engrossed in it."
Suastegui, who lives in LA, had stumbled on immersive reading. The idea is as old as audiobooks themselves, according to The Washington Post. Several educators told NPR they use the strategy in their classrooms to support students with dyslexia and ADHD.
But simultaneous listening and reading is picking up steam among online book communities. Searches for "immersive reading" on TikTok increased nearly 10 times between January and May of 2026, compared to the four months prior — and are up 13 times year over year, according to the company.
Many TikTok users compare immersive reading to watching a movie with subtitles on. Some recommend titles that lend themselves particularly well to listening while reading, including popular BookTok picks like Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary or horror novels like Stephen King's It. With both eyes and ears engaged, some readers say it's easier to enter the world of the book. Some say they retain more. Others say they can read faster.
"I did find that I was definitely zoned in more for longer periods of time," Suastegui said. "Because I couldn't really use my phone for anything else, I couldn't really stop."
Carol Feldman, a retired nurse in Durham, N.C., said she discovered immersive reading by accident because she "wanted to read faster."
"Just listening to an audiobook, I can't concentrate. My mind just goes a million different ways and I totally lose track of the story," said Feldman, who's 80. "Reading the words themselves as [the book is] being read to me allows me to focus on the story."
But Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, warns that immersive reading doesn't always lead to what she calls "deep reading."
Wolf directs the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at UCLA. She says the cognitive patience it requires to struggle through words on a page is essential to deep reading skills like critical thinking, empathy and reflection.
"When I look at audio, whether it's audio with or without print mediums, the reality is that the print reading medium in and of itself gives more time, more attention to the development and maintenance of these deep reading processes," she said.
But if immersive reading is bringing people back to books, Wolf said she's all for it: "With a decline of reading for leisure, for heaven's sake, do whatever we can to get our young and old to say 'this is a return to this experience of being immersed in other worlds with other people.'"
In a time of distraction, immersive reading might be what it takes for some readers to steal their attention back — and get lost in a good book.
Copyright 2026 NPR
