An Audiobook Concert—Wait, Is That a Thing?!

One of the great things about bookish friends is that you find yourself listening to audiobooks you would never listen to on your own. This explains why I found myself listening to Brandi Carlisle’s memoir, Broken Horses. While I do love Carlisle’s music, I’m not the celebrity memoir type. But, my stars, I am SO glad I made an exception for this audiobook.

Carlisle performs the book herself, and let me assure you, it is a PERFORMANCE. She reads her story to her listeners with such earnestness and incredible emotional depth. And in between chapters, she sings a song that has a connection to that point in her life.

I connected with Carlisle’s description of growing up with a learning disability, discussing how music gave her a way to express herself that she wouldn’t have had otherwise. The music she plays to the audio version helps communicate the true depth of her feelings throughout the book. With every up and down in her life, Carlisle has always had music to help her get through it.

At the end of the audiobook, Carlisle gives listeners a mini concert, playing through a range of songs from her career. I’ve rarely loved an audiobook this much and I can’t recommend Broken Horses enough. But be forewarned, you’ll probably need some tissues by the end.

Last year, I loved Lily King’s Writers and Lovers. Now King is back with her new short story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. In each of these ten stories, we meet a range of different characters, who all have their own motivations and desires. A range of narrators perform the audiobook to give every story its own unique voice.

Narrated by Bronson Pinchot, Mark Bramhall, Stacey Glemboski, Cassandra Campbell, and Christa Lewis (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfield)

Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich returns with The Sentence, a ghost novel set in a bookstore. Beginning in 2019, this novel features an older white woman who dies and haunts Birchbark Books (yes, Erdrich’s own bookstore), driving the booksellers wild with her persistent presence. Erdrich performs The Sentence, giving the audiobook an extra personal touch.

Narrated by Louise Erdrich (LaRose by Lousie Erdrich and The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich)

Lou wakes up in an alley in Los Angeles in the 1930s. After being taken in by a foster family, Lou later becomes the first Black woman to join the staff of the Los Angeles Times. But as she continues her life, working hard at writing articles for the newspaper, Lou begins to experience flashes of a different time, a different life than the one she has now.

Narrated by Kevin R. Free and Lisa Renee Pitts (We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza)

I adored Jung Yun’s debut Shelter, so as soon as I could get my hands on her sophomore novel, O Beautiful, I plugged in my headphones and settled in to listen. O Beautiful follows Elinor, a biracial Korean American woman working on a feature story about the oil fields of North Dakota. As Elinor works on the story, she’s forced to confront the memories of her childhood spent in the area and the fractured relationships with her family that she fled decades earlier.

Narrated by Catherine Ho (How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang and The Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho)

Now we are all book lovers here, so I know y’all will adore this audiobook all about libraries. In The Library, the authors tell the history of libraries through the centuries, from personal collections to America’s modern public library system.

Narrated by Sean Barrett (Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco)

Recently, I watched Oprah’s special on Apple TV where she interviews Will Smith about his new memoir. She says, “This is the best memoir that I’ve ever read.” That’s quite the blurb! Smith performs the audiobook of his memoir, making me even more excited for this book.

Narrated by Will Smith