This summer I’ve been listening to audiobooks at a fast clip, and I thought it would be fun and useful to bring you a Quick Lit-style roundup of not just […] The post 18(!!!) audiobooks I’ve enjoyed this summer...
This summer I’ve been listening to audiobooks at a fast clip, and I thought it would be fun and useful to bring you a Quick Lit-style roundup of not just the good books but good listens I’ve enjoyed lately. (We haven’t done an audiobook roundup like this since this time last year, yikes!) I know many of you are avid audiobook listeners, and are always on the lookout for books that are particularly well-suited to that format.
I’m a longtime audiobook fan, but my listening took a big dip at the dawn of the year. It’s interesting to observe the domino effects of a change in routine: I got just a little bit sick in late December, but that mild illness turned into a big problem with my lungs and airway. Long story short, I spent A LOT of time off my feet and on the couch early this year as we struggled to figure out what on earth was happening and what we could do about it. And while couch time isn’t the worst thing in the world, it proved to be terrible for my audiobook listening. I typically listen while I’m walking the dog, folding laundry, watering houseplants (or outdoor plants in the warmer months), standing at the sink doing dishes … and for a while I wasn’t able to do those things.
But come spring I was able to get moving again. My doctors told me it was important to spend time getting my heart rate up, even if it wasn’t particularly comfortable. I started slowly with short walks, which turned into longer walks, and first of all Daisy was over the moon, but then, with the increased listening time, I started racing through audiobooks.
This summer I’ve also spent a good bit of time in the car (like taking kids to college, sniff) or on projects amenable to listening (like freshening up our pantry organization I haven’t touched since early COVID days). That means I’ve racked up lots of listening hours lately!
You’ll see lots of variety in this recent audiobook roundup: old books and new books, an eclectic assortment of genres, first reads and re-reads, books ranging from under four hours in length all the way up to nearly twenty! (You won’t see any truly, epically long listens in this list—but if you have recommendations, I’m all ears! Bookish puns always intended.)
I’m sharing six recent reads below that I haven’t yet told you about here on the blog. With our MMD audiophiles in mind, I also opted to share my twelve summer audiobook listens that I shared throughout the season in Quick Lit, so those great-on-audio books would appear in one place.
As always, I’m tracking my reading in the My Reading Life book journal, which makes it easy to see and share what I’ve been reading lately. I know these are audiobook listens because I jot “audiobook” in the margin. Easy peasy.
I hope you find something that looks intriguing for your TBR on this list (and in these comments!), and I look forward to browsing your recent audiobook winners below. Thanks in advance for your recommendations.
New-to-the-blog audiobook listens
I opted to read these books on audio because I suspected they’d be particularly good in that format, and they did not disappoint.
I've had this on my radar since Anne Helen Petersen named it a favorite in What Should I Read Next episode 284: I need an irresistible read this summer, back in 2021. (That's a great episode, all about burnout and the reading life.) I've loved Erdrich's recent releases and have very much enjoyed listening to her narrate her own work; I believe this is the furthest I've gone into her backlist and I opted to listen here as well. The story spans 36 years in the fictional small town of Argus, North Dakota, a place where Erdrich has set many of her novels. I was delighted to encounter familiar characters in Erdrich's story world and enjoyed getting to know new ones, even if the whole plot didn't quite come together for me. The strong sense of place and robust, textured portrayal of the multifaceted community was worth the price of admission. Erdrich is one of the rare novelists who narrate their own work narration of her own work here. 16 hrs 43 mins. More info ?
This cli-fi novel caught my attention for its comparisons to books I love like Station Eleven and Future Home of the Living God. The author himself calls it a "climate crisis utopia": the story is set in a near-future world that almost collapsed due to the great climate crisis, but global citizens forged a post-nation-state, post-fossil-fuel way of being, and this change became known as The Great Transition. In one timeline, 15-year-old Emi listens to oldies like Adele and Taylor Swift, works on a school research project about The Great Transition, and seeks to find her mother, a missing climate change activist. In the past timeline, we follow Emi's mother and father as they meet and fall in love while working to avert climate disaster before the crucial milestone of Day Zero. This is a fast-paced, intelligent genre mash-up and a worthy addition to the rapidly expanding catalog of ecological fiction. Narrated by Stacy Carolan and Stacy Gonzalez. 11 hrs 31 mins. More info ?
Sometimes the right book drops in my lap exactly when I need it, and that was the case with this 2022 spy thriller: I had just finished The Great Transition on audio and had no idea what to listen to next when I got my library notification alerting me that my long-awaited hold was in! Our team member Donna put this on my radar last summer when she described it as "a perfect page-turner" in WSIRN Ep 344: our team's favorite summer reads. I also loved that it was set in London. In this series opener, British spy Emma Makepeace (not her real name) is charged to deliver her charge—a handsome doctor the Russians want dead—to safety at MI6. But to get to safety, the pair need to cross the city of London and the Thames without being detected by a single of the city's hundreds of thousands CCTV cameras. It sounds impossible, but the alternative is unthinkable. With a fast-moving plot, likable characters, and terrific narration by Sophie Colquhoun, this was a winner. I can't wait for the sequel that comes out later this month. 8 hrs 16 mins. More info ?
I so enjoyed revisiting this 2018 Summer Reading Guide selection, this time on audio as narrated by Rebecca Lowman. In the 1990s, four promising young musicians decide to forego the usual soloist paths and bind their professional (and personal) lives together to form a string quartet. Jana is driven, Henry a prodigy, Daniel a success through dogged determination, and Brit a bit of a wild card. With the feel of a dysfunctional family novel, the characters aren't always likable but always ring true, and Gabel nails a wide range of human emotions—joy and pain, envy and fear, frustration and near-despair—as she portrays the group's turbulent eighteen years together. This utterly believable and emotionally compelling submersion into the competitive world of classical music is for lovers of family dramas and found family narratives. 11 hrs 37 mins. More info ?
I've always listened to Zora Neale Hurston on audio; here the combination of her nonfiction work—just published in its entirety for the first time in 2018—and narrator Robin Miles is exceptional. This is the true story of Cudjo Lewis, believed to have been the last survivor of the last slave ship that came from Africa to the United States. Hurston, who also had a career as an anthropologist, spent three months interviewing Lewis in 1927, when he was nearly 90 years old, in order to tell this story. I especially enjoyed Alice Walker's foreword and was quite surprised by some of its contents (I don't want to say more!). 3 hrs 50 mins. More info ?
I knew nothing about this book going in and really wish I had; let me help you not make the same mistake! This story, which reads somewhat like a darker Elinor Oliphant, begins when Sally's father dies. He told her many a time that he wanted her to put him out with the trash when he dies—and when she takes this advice at face value, she prompts a police investigation that makes headlines. The news reports lead to the disclosure of a secret Sally's adoptive parents had managed to keep buried for many years: the identity of her birth father, who committed unspeakable crimes, including against Sally herself. In many ways, this book is an exploration of generational trauma and the question of nature vs. nurture; shockingly terrible things happen in these pages, yet Sally herself is an altogether winning character and a source of much of the book's humor and light. Although I hear there's less of that light in the original Irish edition: I'm in the U.S., and read an ending that was modified to be a bit more hopeful. (I can't get my hands on that original ending: If you know more, please tell me!) Narrated by Jessica Regan, Stephen Hogan, and Sara Lynam. 10 hrs 4 mins. More info ?
Great-on-audio books that have previously been featured on MMD this summer
For your convenience, I’ve gathered my audiobook-specific recommendations from this summer’s Quick Lit posts here in one place. Happy listening!
I shared this August 1 release in our August edition of Quick Lit. When I included this new release in the 2023 Summer Reading Guide, I closed my blurb with the words "I can't wait to read it again." And despite having a mountainous TBR, I chose to read this brilliant new novel for the second time in six months—this time, on audio. I loved everything about it: its tender familial relationships, Michigan cherry orchard setting, and insider look at summer stock theater. When Lara is nearing sixty and the pandemic is just beginning, her three adult daughters return home for the summer. The girls have long romanticized their mother’s once-upon-a-time romance with a megastar actor, and now, all together again, the girls direct Lara to tell them the whole story from the beginning. She unspools her story slowly, over three long weeks harvesting cherries on the family property. I’m still not sure how I feel about the ending, but the story is gorgeous, wistful, and tender, with every word falling in exactly the right place. 11 hrs 22 mins. More info ?
From June Quick Lit: I had this on my Summer Reading Guide reading list, but I didn't get my copy until just before its May 9 release. And it's long: 448 pages, or nearly 16 hours in the audiobook version I listened to, but the time sped by because I wanted to hear what would happen next! As its title suggests, this enjoyable novel is about the making of a contemporary blockbuster superhero movie, based on a 1970 comic depicting a soldier's experience in WWII. Hanks is clearly writing what he knows here, including lots of juicy details about everything from location scouting to casting concerns to dealing with on-set drama. I especially enjoyed the character backstories that revealed how each cast and crew member got into the business in the first place. The tone is undeniably earnest, but that worked just fine for me. While the print novel contains illustrations of the comic, I would highly recommend the audiobook, read by a full cast including Peter Gerety, Natalie Morales, Rita Wilson, and, of course, Tom Hanks. 15 hrs 57 mins. More info ?
From June Quick Lit: Our team member Ginger raved about this book ... and then when I was looking for an audiobook Will and I could listen to together on our way to the beach, I realized the walk in question takes place on Spain's Camino de Santiago. Will and I were actively anticipating our upcoming trip to Spain, so the timing was perfect! This is the real-time account of the Brat Pack actor's 500-mile walk across Spain with his 19-year-old son Sam, detailing the pair's reasons for embarking on the trip, their long, hot days spent walking—sometimes upwards of 20 miles a day—in the hot summer sun, the fellow walkers they meet along the way, the food they eat, the coffee they drink, the inns they sleep in, what they talk about along the way. We rarely listen to audiobooks together and enjoyed this one so much. The narration was especially good: the elder McCarthy reads the majority but son Sam frequently adds his own voice, which made for a wonderful listening experience. 6 hrs 43 mins. More info ?
From June Quick Lit: I'd heard good things about this memoir since it came out in 2020, but Curtis Sittenfeld (who was a DELIGHT) nudged me to finally read it when she praised it during our MMD Book Club discussion for Summer Reading Guide selection Romantic Comedy. Of course I expected (and enjoyed) stories about SNL, but was pleasantly surprised by much of the contents: I had no idea Jost grew up on Staten Island, or that his mom for many years served as chief medical officer for the NYC Fire Department, or that the most horrifying/laugh-provoking story would be about an infectious disease acquired on a surfing trip to Nicaragua. This celebrity memoir is narrated by the author, and I'm glad I opted for the audiobook. I especially enjoyed the moments when Jost was clearly having a hard time not laughing! 7 hrs 41 mins. More info ?
This 2022 campus novel, which I first shared in July Quick Lit, is our September Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club selection! This story unfolds at Ohio's River Valley School for the Deaf, a boarding school where students come to learn and can count on the cultural richness of the deaf community being celebrated. When Charlie enrolls as a new student, she's never met another deaf student; her parents had kept her in traditional school for far too long, hoping her issues with hearing would simply disappear once they got her cochlear implants dialed in. Charlie knew that would never happen, and quickly makes herself at home in her new school setting, not knowing the school's very existence is actively being threatened. I knew little about deafness and the deaf community prior to reading this book, and ate up all the details about various facets of the deaf experience deaf author Novi? wove into the story. I loved the audiobook narrated by Lisa Flanagan and Kaleo Griffith, with the sound of signing over the speech when ASL was being used. 10 hrs 23 mins. More info ?
Another from August Quick Lit! I picked up this short memoir after Curtis Sittenfeld praised it during our MMD Book Club discussion of Romantic Comedy. This is the almost real-time chronicle of the death of a marriage, an ending that felt premature to the author. What's more, when the story ends, it's not over, necessarily, for the author still does not know what will happen next, either in her life or the life of her marriage. The beginning, at least, is clear: in the opening pages, the husband unexpectedly tells the wife "I'm not happy;" the wife then proceeds to interrogate what might have gone wrong—for she has many theories on this point, though she doesn't know which, if any, is true. The narrator does indeed refer to the characters as "the husband" and "the wife," no one is named in this memoir, and the third person narrative is only occasionally broken by a first person chapter. I would have guessed this approach would make the characters feel distant, but instead felt as though the author was making room to tell a story more universal than the breakdown of one marriage. This is a book about sad things, but I found the storytelling—and specifically the narrative approach—made for interesting listening; I appreciated that Crane voiced her own memoir as I felt I was hearing her story exactly as she intended. 4 hrs 41 mins. More info ?
From August Quick Lit: In this first person, character-driven narrative, we meet thirtysomething ICU doctor Joan. Her relationships with her Chinese and Chinese American family members are fraught, and her inability to read cues makes friendship and neighborliness tricky, but her great love for her work is utterly uncomplicated—that is, until her father dies. Her workaholism has always been seen as an attribute in her NYC hospital, but when she takes just 48 hours off to fly to Shanghai and back for his funeral, HR steps in and makes her take some extended time off. Without the distraction of work, Joan is forced to reckon with the things she's been avoiding, in all their complexity and ambiguity. But then COVID-19 enters the story, with devastating effects in her personal and professional life. I so appreciated being let into Joan's interior world: her cool assessments of the people around her, her dry (and sometimes unintentional) humor, and her frank reckoning with individual and societal struggles. If you enjoy introspective literary fiction on audio, this one belong on your TBR. Catherine Ho's excellent narration was a wonderful way to experience this story. 6 hrs 36 mins. More info ?
Another one from August Quick Lit. This memoir begins in much the same way as Crane's: one night the author's wife turns to him and says she wants a divorce. Both memoirs explore the aftermath of a spouse's revelation, both are written in more or less real time, and yet the stories felt completely different. I think this is as much due to the tone and approach as the ending, as the title indicates that this is not the story of a marriage's dissolution but its unlikely continuation. Key's voice is frank and funny, even as he tells his readers about his wife's affair with a family friend and the chaos this revelation brought to his family, including the couple's three young daughters. Early on, Key takes a close friend's advice to fight for his wife, and proceeds to interrogate his own role in their problems, the past unaddressed traumas that continu