Since June we've been asking our team for their reading recommendations to celebrate a diversity of voices. This month our third recommender Listener Poet Elizabeth Pringle offers a different way to get lost in a new story.
She calls it "reading with your ears," which engages your imagination the way poetry and stories were first shared: as aural traditions. Below, she offers a variety of audiobook reviews and provides links for each selection.
August 2021 image & reviews by
Listener Poet Elizabeth Pringle
I discovered the power of audiobooks a few years ago when I had a long commute to and from work each day. Aside from soothing the road rage and anxiety of my 45-minute-to-an-hour commute, I somehow became a better driver — my mind shifting from the plot of my drive home to a story, leaving me fully alert to the road while engaging my imagination.
I came to understand that a good audiobook is the perfect cocktail of language, story (plot, action, character) and narrator. And with an audiobook the narrator is probably the most important element. A bad narrator can ruin even the most well written book.
For fiction, you really need a narrator who is a good actor and can paint the character in your imagination with their skill of lifting words off the page and into your mind. With non-fiction, more often than not, the author of the book should probably not be the reader, though sometimes they do an amazing job.
The following are some suggestions of audiobooks that serve up the perfect combination of story, language, character, and narrator.
This is Your Mind on Plants
by Michael Pollan (Narrated by Michael Pollan)
Non-fiction
Michael Pollan is an excellent non-fiction storyteller and in this audiobook he is also a wonderful narrator of his own work. In this book he continues his exploration of how humans use plants to explore and change consciousness. Pollan engages the reader/listener through the biology, medical and recreational use of three types of plants that humans use to alter consciousness: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.
In his discussion of caffeine, Pollan makes a statement that I have since been chewing on: our minds and culture changed with the arrival of coffee and the coffeehouse culture. He makes a case for a shift in thinking and writing from a medieval and renaissance ale and wine drinking culture to the more linear Enlightenment mind on coffee. As with his previous book, How To Change Your Mind, Pollan examines and experiences the plants first-hand and backs it all up with scientific and legal research.
Born a Crime
by Trevor Noah (Narrated by Trevor Noah)
Non-fiction/Memoir
This audiobook deserves every award it has received from Best Male Narrator to Highest Rated Book, 2016.
Noah brings alive his stories of growing up in apartheid in South Africa where he was indeed born a crime as a mixed race child. You feel his exhaustion as a child walking to miles to church a few times a week to the dangers of living in apartheid. And all is brilliantly narrated using English, Xhosa, and Zulu dialects of South Africa.
Deacon King Kong
by James McBride (Narrated by Dominic Hoffman)
Fiction
A perfect example of an award-winning book with fascinating and multi-dimensional characters, engaging plot, and stellar narration. A treat for mind, heart, and imagination.
Author, James McBride, is a master of language, plot, and character crafting deeply human, flawed, and humorous people making their way through life’s challenges, misunderstandings, and desires. Starting with a shooting in an African American, Latinx neighborhood in the 1960s and the white neighbors, the cops, the Italian mob, the neighborhood Baptist Church moving through secrets to hope and compassion.
Caste
by Isabel Wilkerson (Narrated by Robin Miles)
Non-Fiction
This is one of the most important books you will ever read or have read to you.
The audiobook is the perfect collaboration of writer and narrator telling the story of the entrenched caste system in America with a backdrop of other caste systems from India to Nazi Germany. Wilkerson defines the eight pillars of a caste system then through examples and stories reveals how the system has worked in this country and by understanding it, how we can change.
Greenlights
by Matthew McConaughey (Narrated by Matthew McConaughey)
Autobiography/Memoir
There are close to 100,000 five star reviews for this audiobook on Audible.com so resist though I might, I eventually had to give it a read/listen.
McConaughey’s memoir is delivered right from the actor/writer’s language to your imagination with brilliantly narrated stories from his life. Through heart, mind, fists, cunning, and courage McConaughey faces challenges and turns them into greenlights.
The Four Winds
by Kristin Hannah (Narrated by Julia Whelan)
Fiction
This is the kind of book I love for long drives — engaging story, characters, and plot.
But the deeper joy of the book is in the narrator, Julia Whelan. I am a fan of her work and have also experienced her five star readings of Educated (by Tara Westover) and The Giver of Stars (by Jojo Moyes) and Gone Girl (by Gillian Flynn).
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