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Audiobooks and more: How many pages is your commute?

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I don’t need to tell you the downside to traffic — heck, we’ve got a whole blog for that. But the upsides are harder to come by. Today, we have the Good Magazine commuting culture consumption chart.

Good compares the length of some hefty works of art — CDs of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the three ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, and the audiobook of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ — to the annual time spent driving to work in major American cities.

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The good news is that the only American city with a long enough annual commute to hear the complete unabridged audiobook of ‘War and Peace’ is Los Angeles. The bad news is that, with a total of 72 hours spent in traffic going to work each year, you could even start on ‘War and Peace’ a second time. Or any number of other classics.

If you aren’t behind the wheel, of course, you can read books instead of listening to them. Patrick, who blogs for Vroman’s Bookstore, says that he’s tripled the number of books he read when commuting by car now that he takes the subway to work.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Richard Hartog / Los Angeles Times

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