Last time I read The Traitor Baru Cormorant, I found it very difficult to follow, to the extent that I felt the need to reread it before picking up the sequel just to have a firm grasp of the plot and major players. This time, I decided to try a new approach: in addition to listening to the audiobook as I usually do, I'd keep a physical copy of the book on hand and switch over to it whenever there was a passage packed so full of details that I lost track of it by ear.

I'm strongly opposed to the idea that audiobooks are a "lesser" way of reading, but for a book like this with a complex plot and stuffed to the gills with proper names, this approach really helped. I'm certainly not planning to do it for everything, but for complex books that I know I'll like enough to buy a physical copy it seems like a great approach. It certainly gave me a deeper appreciation of this than I'd had before.