When I’m reading in audio, my preference is for a long, meaty piece of non-fiction, or a short, voice-y novel. I’m never mad at a full-cast audio, but I like hearing authors read their own work, too. Even a mediocre memoir can be elevated by the experience of hearing the writer’s voice interpret it.
When I love a book and want to figure it out, I’ll read it multiple times—in paper and in audio. Hearing a text can be revelatory. As a novelist, I truly prefer when my books are performed by someone other than me! A deft narrator can transform a text, and I love to be surprised by a performance. I appreciate the collaborative aspects of audio. So much of novel-writing is solitary, but the production of an audiobook feels like putting on a show.
Here are some of my favorite audiobook listens from the past year or so. —Gabrielle Zevin, author of Elsewhere
I’ve read this tight, brilliant novel in paper and in audio. It’s told in second person point-of-view, which gives the audio performance by the author a particular intimacy.
Emily Nussbaum is one of my favorite cultural critics, and her history of reality television—from early game shows and Candid Camera, to The Apprentice—is smart and intermittently terrifying. The chapter on The Apprentice is like a horror movie. Reader Gabra Zackman definitely gets Nussbaum’s sly, writerly voice.
I’ve enjoyed Rob Sheffield’s music criticism for years, and this is an intelligent appreciation of Taylor Swift’s songwriting. He’s a great enthusiast, which comes across in his audio performance, and he makes a convincing case for the song, “Mirrorball.”
Two books about health, read by the authors. Everything is a quick listen, and hearing John Green read a book somehow feels like hearing my conscience. In Magic Pill, Johann Hari is your intrepid guide through diet culture and GLP-1s. Hari is always thoughtful, always a tad mischievous.
The writers do a meticulous job of presenting all the players and showing the incremental and often invisible ways policies and minds can be shifted. Their steady, measured tone is well captured by the narrator Lipica Shah.
Gabrielle Zevin is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of several critically acclaimed novels, including The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and Young Jane Young. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, is a selection of The Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club, the winner of the Goodreads Choice Award, and one of the best books of the year, according to the New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, NPR, and others. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. Her novels have been translated into 40 languages. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
