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Recently I’ve noticed that audiobooks don’t keep me up at night. It’s not that I can’t devour them in their nocturnal orgies, but I can’t tear myself away. No, because I’m sleepy think so much about some audiobooks. Like a movie watched right before bed or a video game played too much, a good audiobook peppered throughout the day can resonate long after you hit pause. Who is the killer? What would I do if I came face to face with a leopard? What was it like to be stricken with scurvy in the middle of the Pacific in the 16th century and floating away from home for months? These three new audiobooks may provide some answers – but expect a fair share of mental somersaults along the way.
About two hours into Paula Hawkins’ home, something remarkable happened. SLOW FIRE BURN (Penguin Voice, 9 hours, 19 minutes). After the quotations, I realized that I no longer needed attribution: I could understand who was speaking without saying it. Yes, this is proof of Hawkins’ writing,”Girl on the Train” fame. But it also taps into the supernatural skills of the audiobook’s narrator, award-winning actor Rosamund Pike. Her evocative, precise presentation gives life to an intelligent identity in a way that my imagination alone could never have. Nearly every character is a suspect, and every suspect is a suspect.” It is fully formed, far beyond the stereotypes to which the genre tends. The mystery surrounds the murder of a young man living in a houseboat on the London canal. From there, Hawkins explores a dense web of troubled family relationships, a meta-narrative and relentless in the form of another best-selling thriller in the plot. It solves a series of tragedies, gleams of beautiful writing (“nicotine yellow walls”) along the way, and in a nutshell, a thought-provoking meditation on jealousy, love, hatred, revenge, and other slowly burning emotions.
Science writer Mary Roach has a similar interest in the human condition; In his books on death, sex, the digestive system, and more, he definitely takes a less emotional perspective on who we are and why we do what we do. Inside FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law (Brilliance Audio, 9 hours, 17 minutes), With his obsessive look and cheeky humor, Roach addresses the age-old question: “What’s the right way when nature breaks the laws against humans?” Roach travels the world, from Colorado ski towns to tea farms in India to a landfill where robotic hawks are used, to understand how we’re handling the growing incidence of human-animal interaction. There are thieving monkeys, elusive cougars (“How do you count what you can’t see?”) and murderous trees, all pointing to the real culprit behind these supposed crimes: us.
As a narrator, Roach is not Rosamund Pike. I resented his mindless attempts to imitate the intonation of the Indian bureaucrats and environmentalists he had met on his travels. (The Yogi-esque temptation to give a bear a theoretical voice is far more appealing.) But he presents his funniest one-line words in a slide that will make you sniff out loud (“the future of shit science”) is bright). And the travel moments that interrupt the zoological deep dives lend a personal authenticity to an otherwise easy-to-dry narrative.
If you’ve never looked up at the ceiling thinking about the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, get ready. CONQUER THE PACIFIC: An Unknown Sailor and the Last Great Journey of the Age of Discovery (HarperAudio, 6 hours, 6 minutes), Written by Andrés Reséndez, the book chronicles the crowning achievement of a relatively unknown sailor named Lope Martín, who piloted the ship known as “la vuelta” from the Philippines across the Pacific to the Americas in the mid-16th century. . If centuries of trans-Pacific trade, exploitation, and migration weren’t remarkable enough, Reséndez asks us to consider the possibilities Martín faces as an Afro-Portuguese pilot working for the Spaniards. He writes that although Black Sears were not unheard of at the time, Martín was “remarkably rare”, especially when he was shoulder to shoulder with ship captains, regents, and clergy.
Told in the warm, fuzzy tones of a PBS documentary by actor Phil Morris, the audiobook covers all the delicious, twisty details of Martín’s journey—the riots, murder, and backstabbing—though listeners who only hope for adventure stories may be disappointed. . In fact, Reséndez is so intent on presenting the historical, geological and cultural context that the “vuelta” story begins just one hour and 20 minutes after the narrative. There are lengthy accounts of tides and whirlpools before, during and after, sea explorers and early colonists, territorial disputes and accidental agreements. It is appropriate to begin the book with a description of the Pacific as seen from space. As Reséndez makes clear, there’s more to consider here than a single person’s ocean voyage.
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