Dear Readers,
I have a confession. Until roughly a year ago, I never understood the hype surrounding audiobooks. Why listen to a book if you can simply just sit down with a physical copy and get to it? Why listen to someone do the work for you? Why can I not connect to a certain narrator? Why, why, why?
It turns out, dear readers, that I was sadly mistaken. The problem was that my first foray into audiobooks tainted my perspective because they weren’t titles that I’d chosen myself, which meant that I stupidly wrote off an entire medium of the written word.
Once I finally dove headfirst into the world of podcasts, I finally had an epiphany. I love the podcast world…why would audiobooks be that much different? For years, I had struggled to really dig deep into the nonfiction genre, even though there were a lot of books that sounded interesting. I’d pick them up, but have moments where I was failing to grasp certain concepts or the writing, while interesting, seemed to be missing something. Taking a chance, I downloaded the audiobook version of Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, a book that I’d tried to start multiple times, but one in which the dots just weren’t connecting in my brain.
Needless to say, I. Was. Hooked.
For the first time, I actually understood and was enthralled by the story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. The tricky medical concepts that had flown over my head before? While I couldn’t write a thesis for others, I certainly got them enough myself to understand the fraud at the heart of the story.
From there, I went down a deep audiobook rabbit hole and it wasn’t just nonfiction that gripped me. I realized that a fantastic audiobook could keep me listening hours into the night. They could keep me entertained on a long road trip where the radio simply wouldn’t do. They brought new color to the genres I loved (mysteries, thriller, horror), and those I’d wanted to explore but just couldn’t connect to in written form (looking at you Midnight in Chernobyl). When the pandemic hit it’s peak, I had a really hard time sitting down with a physical book and reading…but audiobooks were different. They allowed me to multitask and keep myself busy in a world where I had no control. As much as I still love the feeling of holding a physical book and sitting outside in the sun and reading, I now fully understand how wonderful and rewarding the experience of an audiobook can be. The medium allows readers of all ages and abilities the opportunity to connect to the written word, albeit in a different way.
So this June, I welcome you to celebrate National Audiobook Month. The following is a small list of some of the best and most popular audiobooks we have at WPL, but if these aren’t for you, then stop by the library or browse our OverDrive collection. And remember…if you don’t find something you love the first time, don’t give up. Trust me on that.
Happy Reading!
-Julie, Communications & Outreach Librarian
PS: I’m also the one who pieces together our monthly newsletter and we’d love for you to subscribe! Click here to sign up!
All summaries are courtesy of each book’s publisher.
The Secret Place by Tana French
Narrated by Stephen Hogan and Lara Hutchinson
Audio Available at Warren Public Library
The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls’ boarding school in Dublin. The caption says: I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM. Detective Stephen Moran receives this photo from sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey. ‘The Secret Place,’ a board where the girls at the school can pin up their secrets anonymously, but was used to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder. Stephen joins forces with Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why. Tana French is a staff favorite author.
Carrie by Stephen King
Narrated by Sissy Spacek
Audio Available at Warren Public Library
Stephen King’s legendary debut, about a teenage outcast and the revenge she enacts on her classmates. Carrie White may be picked on by her classmates, but she has a gift. She can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. This is her power and her problem. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offers Carrie a chance to be a normal…until an unexpected cruelty turns her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that no one will ever forget. Stephen King is a staff favorite author.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Narrated by Cassandra Campbell
Audio Available on Overdrive and at Warren Public Library
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens. Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
Narrated by the Author
Audio Available on Overdrive and at Warren Public Library
Malcolm Gladwell, the popular podcast host and author explores how people interact with strangers and why these exchanges often go wrong, offering strategic tips for more accurate and productive interactions. The audiobook edition of Talking to Strangers was an instant #1 bestseller, and was one of the most pre-ordered audiobooks in history. It seamlessly marries audiobooks and podcasts, creating a completely new and real listening experience.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller
Audio Available on Overdrive
Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles? Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo’s clients have lapsed (and she still has a three-month waiting list). With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house “spark joy” (and which don’t), this international bestseller featuring Tokyo’s newest lifestyle phenomenon will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home-and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
Narrated by Michael Kramer
Audio Available at Warren Public Library
A new epic series by the best-selling writer of Robert Jordan’s final Wheel of Time novels introduces the world of Roshar through the experiences of a war-weary royal compelled by visions, a highborn youth condemned to military slavery and a woman who would save her impoverished house. Brandon Sanderson is a staff favorite author.
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Narrated by Dan Stevens
Audio Available on Overdrive
One of the most famous and beloved mysteries from The Queen of Suspense—Agatha Christie. Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion off the Devon coast by a mysterious “U. N. Owen.” At dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret, and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead. Stranded by a violent storm, and haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one…as one by one…they begin to die. Which among them is the killer and will any of them survive?
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Narrated by Cassandra Campbell
Audio Available on OverDrive
A haunting debut novel about a mixed-race family living in 1970s Ohio and the tragedy that will either be their undoing or their salvation. An exquisite debut novel about a Chinese American family living in a small town in 1970s Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Narrated by the Author
Audio Available at Warren Public Library
Sussex, England: A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. He is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet sitting by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean), the unremembered past comes flooding back. Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie – magical, comforting, wise beyond her years – promised to protect him, no matter what. A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. A stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Narrated by Kirsten Potter
Audio Available at Warren Public Library
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production. Jeevan Chaudhary, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside as life disintegrates outside.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Narrated by Edward Herrmann
Audio Available on OverDrive and at Warren Public Library
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Narrated by Scott Brick
Audio Available on OverDrive and at Warren Public Library
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake. The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Narrated by Jim Dale
Audio Available at Warren Public Library
A circus, titled Le Cirque des Rêves, comes to town out of the blue and without warning. Within its tents, young magicians Celia and Marco compete to be the best, having done so since childhood. However, under the backdrop of their intense rivalry, a blossoming romance develops.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Narrated by Claire Danes
Audio Available at Warren Public Library
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now.
Camino Island by John Grisham
Narrated by January LaVoy
Audio Available on OverDrive and at Warren Public Library
A gang of thieves stage a daring heist from a secure vault deep below Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless but Princeton, has insured it for twenty-five million dollars. Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts. Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer’s block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous offer of money convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable’s circle of literary friends, ideally getting close enough to him to learn his secrets. But eventually Mercer learns far too much, and there’s trouble in paradise as only John Grisham can deliver it.
