I’ve Listened To 50 Audiobooks This Year, Here Are Some Of The Best
We’re well past the half-year point, but I just hit 50 books read so I thought now would be a good time as any to do a mid-year check-in with some of the best books I’ve read (listened to) this year.
In January, I listened to Recursion and Dark Matter, both written by Blake Crouch. Both books deal with time travel but in very different ways; Recursion is about a police detective named Barry Sutton who is investigating an epidemic in which the victims have incredibly vivid memories of a life they’ve never lived. Throughout his investigation, Barry discovers a vast conspiracy to keep secret and to control large-scale events with a power no human should possess. It’s a book that’s as interested in the science and tech of the world as it is the human connections at play.
Dark Matter is a book that, while similar in concept, alternate dimensions rather than separate timelines, is also much more singular in its approach to the human element. One night, Jason Desson is kidnapped and sent to an alternate dimension, one a lot like his own, but instead of pursuing a rich family life, as he chose to in his world, in this world he chose to make his career his top priority. As you can probably tell, Dark Matter is a book very much about the paths chosen, but also the paths not chosen and the differences therein.
Also in January, I checked out the book that inspired my favorite tv show of the 2021/2022 TV season, Station Eleven. Written by Emily St. John Mandel, the book’s premise is that a virus has wiped out 99.9% of the world’s population, but it’s very much not about that. What the show is interested in is how people find communities and like-minded individuals who also want to carry on the flame that, since the beginning of human history, we’ve always been storytellers. It’s a show that, very much like The Leftovers, is about found families and how the stitching that we use to form larger communities can come from similarities that we find in centuries-old stories.
Much of February and March were taken up with The Wheel Of Time books, which you can read about here. I filled some blindspots in April by checking out Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, The Road, and his Border Trilogy; All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. All in all, the prose Mr. McCarthys employs in his books is, to put simply, some of the most profoundly moving and beautifully composed passages in any book I’ve read this year. If you want to experience Cormac at his most accessible, I would recommend starting with No Country For Old Men and then Blood Meridian for something a bit more challenging.
Notable reads in late April into early May were The Troop and The Deep by Nick Cutter. Anyone who sees themselves as a passing fan of folks like Stephen King or Stephen Graham Jones will find many similarities with Nick Cutter’s writing style and content. The Troop is essentially a survival story, with an unknown sickness sweeping through the camp where a scout troop planned to stay for the week. The book is chock full of body horror, The Thing-like internal paranoia, and bullies getting their comeuppance. The Deep is a similarly positioned book in the body-horror/who can you trust pantheon of horror books and movies, but taking place in an underwater lab. The setting lends itself to a deep, broad, and pervasive sense of claustrophobia and intense, building anxiety.
At the end of May, I dove headlong into one of the most notoriously difficult books to make heads or tails of, David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest. Coming in at a staggering 1,076 pages or 70 hours in audiobook form, simply keeping a toehold on the plot mechanics, never mind mining it for an over-arching theme, was nothing short of a miracle. From what I could make out, Infinite Jest is a biting, intellectual satire of late 90’s American athletics, addiction, and consumer culture. It’s like if Hunter S. Thomson did slightly fewer drugs and went to Harvard.
In June, the oral history of the making of Mad Max: Fury Road was recommended to me. The book was like catnip to me, with the making and behind-the-scenes stories of how films are made are utterly fascinating to me. What-could-have-been’s are scattered throughout this book, with the beginnings of the production of Fury Road tracing all the way back to the late 90s. All the way up to, and even a little bit after his July 2006 anti-Semitic rant to a highway patrolman, Mel Gibson was seriously considered to reprise his role as Max. That one anecdote notwithstanding, the rest of the book is filled with firsthand accounts of the insane and unbelievable human ingenuity it took to get this film made.
I kicked off a month-long journey into Stephen King Land in July with The Stand. The book highlights all of the horror maestros’ best qualities; deeply interesting and compelling characters, a tactile and lived-in world, and a devilishly wicked but charismatic villain in Randall Flagg.
After that, I listened to three of his short story collections; The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams, Different Seasons, and Skeleton Crew. The best of those being the heavy hitters most people are aware of: The Mist, which the movie version ranks as most people’s most hated twists, The Shawshank Redemption, The Body (which was made into Stand By Me), The Jaunt, and The Raft.
Along with the short story binge I went on, I also checked out his foray into detective fiction. The three books he would write in the genre were called his Bill Hodges trilogy, about an aging, retired detective hunting down a modern-day serial killer. If there were one major letdown in the series of books, it would be the clear lack of understanding of modern tech and how degenerates like the killer would be using it.
Lastly, one of the most recent books I read (LISTENED TO! Yea yea) was also my favorite audiobook I listened to this year from this year, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It’s a story about Sam Masur and Sadie Green, two video game designers in the early to mid-90s who make a game that becomes a runaway hit. They quickly devote their entire waking life to making a sequel, and needing better tech, Sadie contacts her old professor whom she had a romantic relationship with while in school. The situation quickly spirals out of control, with her professor taking advantage of the power dynamic and sexually, emotionally, and physically abusing her.
The story is very much about Sadie getting out from under his control and finding a healthy relationship, but also about Sam who, since he was a kid, has had a debilitating foot injury. How he has had to move about a world that has never been constructed or designed for folks like himself and how he learns to deal with it. Tomorrow… is also a book about pushing back against various hate groups and how that can have unforeseen, long-lasting, and collateral damage far outside your own purview.
Honorable Mentions: The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson, A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Trembly, and The Only Good Indian By Stephen Graham Jones
