I realised Audible had gone mainstream when I last wrote about how much I use – and love – this truly great audiobook service. Instead of having to explain what it was anymore, I was almost always greeted with requests for recommendations.
I think of Audible, which I have been using for about two decades now, as the new way to “read” books. But really it’s the old, original way stories were told, using the spoken voice. It was only a few hundred years ago that reading itself went mainstream. I think of Audible as reading the 21st-century way.
These are my current favourite “reads” on Audible, many of which I’ve included in other columns over the years. I generally listen to four things, I realised looking through my library: non-fiction, science fiction, serious fiction (the kind of high-brow literature I studied at university and still love), and, oddly enough, Scandinavian crime fiction.
Science fiction
My favourite genre to read is science fiction. In my reading-loving parents’ house, there were lots of Isaac Asimov and JRR Tolkien books stacked on the shelves. My mother read me The Hobbit as a kid and took me to see Star Wars when it first showed in South Africa. I was only seven.
A recent find was Richard Morgan’s wonderful Altered Carbon series, which has since had two seasons of a Netflix show. I love Morgan’s depiction of a future time when our consciousnesses have been digitised and are embedded in a physical device at the base of our skulls. Human bodies have become known by the slang name of “sleeves” because these digitised consciousnesses can be zapped across the universe (who really needs to know exactly how it works…) and “resleeved” in bioengineered bodies. Morgan’s introduction of ancient Martian culture and technology is a wonderful enigma that weaves throughout the books.
I also loved Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which I loved on Kindle and loved even more on Audible because it was narrated excellently by Wil Wheaton.
Local author Lauren Beukes has written a brilliant sci-fi novel set in South Africa called Zoo City, which has won great praise, including from William Gibson, who coined the word “cyberspace” in his must-read Neuromancer. In fact, it’s probably best you just read everything by Gibson.
I’ve only recently discovered Andy Weir, whose Project Hail Mary is the best sci-fi work I’ve read in years. The first time I ever finished it, utterly enraptured, I immediately started all over again. The movie is good, sure, but the book, as it so often is, is infinitely better.
I have revisited all my favourite sci-fi authors over the years and can still highly recommend Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, anything by Iain M. Banks, starting with Consider Phlebas. Then there’s Dan Simmons’ epic space odyssey, the Hyperion series, another worthy “read”. Don’t discount his ancient Greece-inspired Ilium, which is really, really good.
“You have to read this”, a friend told me as he thrust a large book into my hands when I was visiting him in San Francisco. It was Daemon by Daniel Suarez. I’ve read it several times, as well as its equally excellent sequel, Freedom.
For sheer fun and laughter, there’s the hilariously witty Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, starting with The Colour of Magic. I’ve just started listening to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch series again. Amazingly, one of the voices is the great British actor Bill Nighy.
High fiction
I don’t know what else to call this high-minded, deeply thoughtful literature that I studied at varsity, other than high fiction.
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez are two of my favourites, as is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
Non-fiction
I’ve been listening to some really fascinating blockbusters about how we should keep our kids away from screens and social media for their own mental health. I especially recommend The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt is a professor at NYU Stern, as is Scott Galloway, whose The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google eviscerates how these tech titans have shaped our lives.
If you are interested in the tech world, then Kara Swisher’s Burn Book is an epic front-seat account of the rise of Silicon Valley by the first-ever IT journalist, hired by the first-ever technology journalist Walt Mossberg.
If the internet has a patron saint, it is Kara Swisher. She is the Hunter S. Thompson of technology journalism. When I grow up, I want to write like her, while still retaining her true-north moral compass and acerbic wit. I also wouldn’t mind growing up to be as sarcastically funny as Scott Galloway.
I’ve loved Johann Hari’s mind since he wrote Chasing the Scream about addiction, and I think his latest book, Magic Pill about Ozempic and the miracle weight-loss drugs, is a must read/listen. Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 8 are great brainfood – especially in conjunction with chapters 5, 14 and 15 of Bill Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants.
The whole of Bryson’s The Body is required reading, especially because he reads it himself (as does Hari) and he’s so outrageously funny and outrageously brilliant. He does these great deep dives into a topic – At Home, The Mother Tongue, Shakespeare, and his epic A Short History of Nearly Everything – and finds all the fascinating and hilarious nuggets to share with you. You can almost hear him laughing sometimes.
Another extraordinary journalist is Michael Pollan, who focuses on subjects like Cooked, In Defense of Food, and This Is Your Mind on Plants. I particularly liked his short “listen” on Caffeine.
I loved reading Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik on my Kindle and have bought it again on Audible, as well as several other great reads from this materials scientist who explains the world around us so eloquently and in such real terms. I’ve bought his other books Liquid, Liquid Rules, and It’s a Gas.
I’ve been recommended Simon Sebag Montefiore so often; I bought Jerusalem, The Biography and Titans of History. I loved his speeches anthology, Voices of History. Speaking of history, Malcolm Gladwell has done an interesting project called The Bomber Mafia about the Allied bombing campaign against Germany in World War II.
I am a big fan of Yuval Noah Harari, one of the most rational and insightful people alive, and his latest book Nexus is absorbing and prescient.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is the first of the many worthwhile books by the great Gabor Maté you should read. He’s the wisest of wise men in the world when it comes to mental health and raising kids.
Crime fiction
It only occurred to me recently to reread Stieg Larsson’s excellent Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. He truly is a masterful storyteller who takes you on a remarkable ride through modern-day Sweden (circa early 2000s, SMSing 2G cellphones, and early internet services), Cold War espionage, up and down endless Stockholm streets ending in “garden”, and adroitly using fiction to tell the real story: the appalling sexual abuse suffered by women in Sweden.
I came across Larsson around 2010, and was also introduced to Henning Mankell, the other Swedish crime author whose Inspector Wallander books were also made into a TV series starring Kenneth Branagh.
That was solidly in my Kindle phase of reading, so I was delighted to see that the Kindle book syncs to where you are in the Audible book.
Kids fiction
This is especially handy on family car journeys, where we have begun listening to JK Rowling’s seven-book Harry Potter series, read by brilliant Stephen Fry.
The evergreen Roald Dahl reads his own glorious stories in this collection of classics.
The genius actor Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies, reads Tolkien’s more child-friendly The Hobbit. There’s no question that this is where I picked up my love of fantasy and science fiction. And probably science as well.
