I run all of my audiobooks at 1.25x speed as a bare minimum. If a narrator is particularly slow, sometimes I’ll even bump it up as high as 2x. Any half-decent audiobook player will have built-in speed controls.

For instance, if you’re running AudioBookShelf for self-hosting your audiobooks, Plappa (an unofficial but very well done listening app that syncs to your server) has it right there on the bottom:
Image
On my particular color scheme it is purple, but you can change that in the settings. You can also set things like auto-pause (after {x} time, at the end of the chapter, or at the end of the next chapter), and bookmarks (which you can label) to come back to later.