Best Audiobooks For Healthy Lifestyle – Memoirs, mysteries, and coming-of-age stories are elevated by a powerful voice—the full revelation of a great actor or writer. Here, 15 artists and critics pick their favorite audiobooks
The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steven Peters (2012) is a fascinating book about cognitive behavior that reframes the different parts of us all, human, chimp and computer. It’s such a serious subject, yet Peters’s narration is so flat and delivered with a strong Northern accent that it somehow makes it matter-of-fact and easy to digest. The phrase “there’s a breakdown in chimp management” made me laugh.
Best Audiobooks For Healthy Lifestyle
Jane Gardam’s Old Filth (2015) is excellent in every way, brought to life by a stunning performance by actor Bill Wallis.
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Fame Get under the skin of the aging central character, QC, with such skill that you feel like you’re reading his mind.
Not every writer can narrate their own stories well, but Pictures in My Head by Gabriel Byrne (1995) and Alec Baldwin (2017) are the best. Both cover the lives of these actors from their childhood to the present day with humor and sincerity. I loved them both.
If you’re looking for a shamanic spell that can stamp the block universe of Northampton on your mind forever, you should listen to Alan Moore’s 60 Hours of Jerusalem (2016), charmingly read by Simon Vance. At the end of a week of listening, you’re more likely to start over and finally tell your distraught partner that you’re moving the whole family to Northampton to spend the rest of your life on the ghost-infested streets.
Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café (2016) on Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir and others, which inspired our first duffel coat purchase, is a great book to read, but listening to it lets your eyes wander around the café and judge. Anxiety, confusion and masks of those lurking in chattal dosa or frothy milk.
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Finally, neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky’s Biology of Human Behavior, Behave (2018), read by Michael Goldstrom, captures some of the gamesmanship of the beguiling lecturer.
I recommend Adam Buxton’s (2020) Ramble Book, short on prose, though with wonderful, melancholy passages about his father and Bowie, and 80s nostalgia, it’s perfect for those of us who get teary-eyed on first listen. Dexys Midnight Runners or something. But it’s more about how much fun he has with the odds. He writes jingles for the beginning of each chapter. He takes us on beautiful, audio-only tangents. Audiobook recording had a solemnity. Deviation from the set text was considered heresy. Adam’s book is full of the joy of doing the opposite.
In Novalette Bulawayo’s coming-of-age story We Need New Names (2013), you are transported to Zimbabwe through the voice of 10-year-old Darling growing up in a paradise shack under Mugabe’s rule. Seeing the country through the eyes of a child is both delightful and heartbreaking. You worry about her future. But then we migrate to the Midwest United States and we’re stuck in the cold, and Darling learns that the grass isn’t always greener.
For a different voice, Rafif Ziada, a spoken word artist and activist, watched a video on YouTube presenting We Teach Life. The line “Today, my body was a TV carnage” kept ringing in my ears. I went for the albums Hadeel and We Are Life where you get lessons on the plight of Palestine, protest and celebration of the Arabic language. Her voice captures the excitement of live music and performance on recordings.
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When talking about power and legitimacy, Malcolm Gladwell quotes Trevor Noah from David and Goliath (2013).
. The book is a series of case studies that explore how underdogs overcome the odds. I noticed these examples of success when I started my Couch to 5K program and began to confront what I perceived as shortcomings in my life and work. I finished the book and kept running!
Irish actor Jim Norton’s reading of The Third Policeman (2012) is one of my favorite audiobooks because it adds a layer to Flann O’Brien’s novel that I couldn’t grasp when reading the prose. Beneath the sublime surrealism and joy of the tall tale, I discovered a level of existential dread and dread.
I also listen to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy narrated by Peter Wickham (2020). It’s nice that he takes the longest possible route through any sentence.
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I’ve got Stephen King’s The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015) on the go – a short story here, another there, for walks or when I need a snack, not a meal.
The best thing about the audiobook format is how it’s changed over the past two decades. The head of my publisher’s audiobook division resigned in 2003, saying that cars without cassette decks had ruined the audiobook format. Her replacement showed me a strange object called an iPod, and I knew we were nowhere near the end.
One of the best narratives I’ve heard in the past two years is Kamila Shamsi’s reimagining of Sophocles.
It’s a complicated story, the intertwined lives of two families, but her voice captivated me and I never lost track.
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I also recommend reading Prof Emma Smith’s book This Is Shakespeare (2019). This is a fascinating overview of 20 of his plays that explores the questions they raise and the themes that underlie them. It’s based on her Oxford lectures, so it’s perfect to listen to, and she has a very charming voice.
Host Trevor Noah is the son of a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother and was born in South Africa in 1984 – a time when the interracial union was sentenced to five years in prison. Born a Crime (2016) is a devastatingly personal story of the psychosis of apartheid thinking that is moving and hilarious. No one can convince me that there is a better way to read this than Noah telling you.
I also think that Macar Jackie Kay’s voice in Scotland is a form of poetry. In Red Dust Road (2010) she takes you on a journey through adoption in the 1960s, a gay black woman coming of age and her struggle to find and love her biological parents and her Nigerian heritage.
Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston believed deeply in the literary genius of African American oral traditions and recorded them at great personal cost. So it seems only fitting that her greatest novel, written in 1937 – There Eyes Where Watching God – should be experienced in audio form. Veteran civil rights activist and acting legend Ruby Dee in the 2004 edition was a great privilege to read, and one I recommend.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americana was a book I struggled to accept after finishing it because I wanted – no, needed – to keep going.
I had to choose something narrated by Adjoa Ando as she narrates many of the books I listen to. Ando stars alongside a stellar cast in a performance of Naomi Alderman’s addictive novel The Power (2016).
She read Michelle Obama’s Becoming 47 times better and deeply moved, not because we lost. I also featured two new volumes of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust narrated by Michael Sheen. My favorite though is the Slaughterhouse-Five narrated by Vonnegut himself.
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I’m very picky about what I listen to – I tend to stick to the reader’s voice rather than reading myself, but I love Diary of a Drag Queen (2019) by Krystal Rasmussen, AKA Tom Rasmussen, reading Krystal. It’s partly a memoir about fighting shame, and while some of the stories should make you cringe, reading them is a liberating experience for the author, and it takes you past the shame and into something warmer.
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Another book I regularly listen to is Alan Bennett’s Reading Childhood Classics to Sleep to My Five-Year-Old Son (2017).
Works best for us. There is something about the language and the ideas, sometimes quite melancholy and often out of the grasp of a five-year-old, but, combined with the animal comforts of a small woodland, deeply soothing.
Believe it or not, the best audiobook I’ve ever heard is actor Rob Lowe’s autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends (2011). For some reason, he heard his crazy life story being read in his own quiet, familiar voice. I heard it all at once on the long car ride to my mother’s house.
Bill Nighy, a world-weary actor and detective in the Charles Paris Mysteries, is perfect casting, his voice whiskey and Shakespearean and suspicious. Adapted by Jeremy Friend from Simon Brett’s novels, these mysteries are perfect for late night listening. are plots
