6 favorite audiobooks, from a classic to ‘zhuzh’
So, you’ve decided you want to listen to a book rather than read one. Maybe you have a car ride ahead of you with friends or loved ones, or maybe you are just finding it harder than usual to concentrate on the page (who among us?). But before you download the MP3 version of whatever hardcover you never got around to reading, know that some books are not just entirely distinct on audio but perhaps even better narrative experiences when heard. Here is a selection of our favorites, across genres and time periods.
“Anna Karenina.” By Leo Tolstoy, read by Maggie Gyllenhaal (35 hours, 35 minutes; Audible Studios).
Perhaps 35 hours sounds as daunting to you as the nearly 900-page hard copy. It shouldn’t: Voicing each of the 19th-century Russian novel’s many characters, and giving each his or her own idiosyncratic lilt, Gyllenhaal delivers Tolstoy’s pathos and plot with equal grace, sustaining the listener like a marathoner until she crosses the finish line. But by then you won’t even want it to end.
“The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir.” By Andre Leon Talley, read by the author (9 hours, 38 minutes; Random House Audio).
It’s one thing to read the searing critiques and salacious gossip from the halls of Conde Nast by the former Vogue editor-at-large, but it’s quite another to hear him tell it in his own distinctive voice. While some passages will feel as if he’s grabbed you backstage at Fashion Week to spill everything, the most affecting ones dive back into his childhood in the rural South, where, Rebecca Carroll wrote in The New York Times Book Review, he “got swallowed whole by the white gaze and was spit out as a too-large Black man when he no longer fit the narrative.”
“Daisy Jones & the Six.” By Taylor Jenkins Reid, read by Jennifer Beals, Benjamin Bratt, Judy Greer and a full cast (9 hours, 3 minutes; Random House Audio).
Narrated by an ensemble cast (which includes Greer, whose voice is instantly recognizable), this story about a fictional band doing drugs and having sex on tour in the ’70s will take you far away from your current mindset and into the irresistible melodrama of American rock stars.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.” By Isabel Wilkerson, read by Robin Miles (22 hours, 40 minutes; Brilliance Audio).
The Great Migration was a movement that is impossible to contain in hard numbers, dates or demographics. Wilkerson’s magnificent history focuses on three individual Black lives and the paths they took from the South in search of greater freedoms. Audie Award-winning narrator Miles delivers these three interwoven tales, which together represent a phenomenon so much larger than themselves, with all the novelistic empathy they deserve.
“Lost Children Archive.” By Valeria Luiselli, read by the author and a full cast (11 hours, 16 minutes; Random House Audio).
Luiselli’s novel about a makeshift family (an unnamed husband and wife, his son and her daughter) making their own road trip of sorts from Brooklyn to the Mexican border lends itself almost too naturally to the audio format. Both the narrator and her husband are what she calls “sound documentarians,” journalists who record the world around them through its noises, musical and otherwise. The voices of their children in the second half also lend a heart-wrenching dimension to this story that no hardcover could approximate.
“Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love.” By Jonathan Van Ness, read by the author (5 hours, 50 minutes; HarperAudio).
The “Queer Eye” grooming expert’s singular humor and unshakable tenacity come across even more convincingly in this searing audio version of his memoir — about his lifelong battles with self-worth, drugs and HIV — than they do in print. Plus, the word “zhuzh” just really doesn’t have the same effect in writing.