Last year, I read (listened to) 6 audio books. My work, which for the last year has been either delivering mail or working alone at a fish operation in New Hampshire (and related commuting) has afforded me ample time to listen to media on my phone. In truth, my consumption of audio media is insatiable. I am happiest when I am deep into a nice long audiobook!
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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Read by Cassandra Campbell
There is some scandal around this book, but I frankly didn’t know much about that when I listened to it. The scandal is itself spoilerific, so I recommend you do the same. My friend Alex recommended I read this book many years ago, and I finally managed to half-keep the promise to read it by listening.
The story tells of a child abandoned by her family in the marshes of the North Carolina coast (not Louisiana as I thought). She learns self sufficiency, hunting clams for money and boiling grits to eat. She evades capture from case managers and social workers. Kya (pronounce Kai-ya) eventually masters her environment and catalogues all the life of the marsh around her. The narrative occasionally leaps a decade forward in time to give us brief updates on a murder case that some cops are trying to work out. Push through those parts, they start to make more sense as the story progresses. When the two timelines eventually converge, the story hits peak tension!
The scenes of the swamp described throughout the book are breathtaking. As our heroine grows up throughout the novel, the book blossoms into a young romance. There IS a love triangle! There is segregation-era racial politics. The trauma of living alone in the marsh weighs heavy on Kya throughout the story, and every moment of happiness she gets to experience really uplifts you. I smiled to myself a lot while listening, and the moments of tension will have your butt clamped hard.
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Mistborn Trilogy (Graphic Audio) by Brandon Sanderson
Read by a full cast with SFX!
Love him, hate him, its Brandon Sanderson. I have tried to read his work in the past and it came off as simplistic and cheesy to me. That is, until I listened to this graphic audio edition of his Mistborn trilogy! With a full cast reading the lines for different characters and fight scenes animated with clattering blades and swooshing sounds… it’s like listening to an action movie. The simplicity of the characters doesn’t matter so much when the story moves and sounds like a film.
And underneath the action is a addictive fantasy world set in a sort of post-apocalyptic industrial city in a realm ruled over by an immortal god emperor and his army. The magic system is cool to figure out– gifted individuals can “burn” metals by digesting them in their stomach. Depending on the metal burned, a boon is received. Tin burners can heighten their senses. Pewter burners become physically strong and durable. Iron burners can pull metal toward themselves like Jedi. Steel burners can push themselves off of metals. Those who can burn all metals are called Mistborn, and they are extremely powerful.
Like Crawdad, this story features a young female protagonist left to survive on her own for years before meeting real friends and finding some romance. There are moments where you will be smiling to yourself like an idiot. There are also moments where you hear someone’s bones pop in their hand one by one as each finger is crushed.
Mistborn is metal as fuck. I love the inquisitors. The lore of the world gets deeper and deeper until eventually all the secrets are revealed by the third book and it wraps up phenomenally. Listening to it all unfold through audio is probably the best way to take it in. Brandon Sanderson finally got me!
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11-22-63 by Stephen King
Read by Craig Watson (with an afterword from the author)
This is Stephen King’s big time travel book. Did I know it was a time travel book when I picked it up? Hell no! I only knew that the book was sort of vaguely about Kennedy? Well yeah its a lot about Kennedy actually. More so as the story progresses.
This is also the first Stephen King book I ever read. I also assumed he was a pulpy sensational writer that turned out infinite pages of slop. Nope, Stephen King is the MAN! His writing is awesome! His characters are crude, very human. They have plausible desires and fall in love. There are SEX SCENES! There are shootings, brawls, getaways! A man looses the top of his scalp! These moments of excited are punctuations in an otherwise contemplative story about a teacher trying to be a writer while exploring an alien-yet-familiar world.
Embedded in this story is a tale of love that will have you almost crying (maybe I did cry a bit). There are a few arks to the story itself, beginning in Maine and eventually ending up in Dallas Texas. I won’t say more. Stephen King has a wild ride in store for you!
Craig Watson has a great voice for the story, and he even handles reading the main heroine’s lines very well. The story features quite a few regional accents including Maine and some southern drawls, and he takes them all on convincingly. I found myself wanting so much more by the time it was over. The whole book ends in a jiffy.
Jimla… JIMLA!!!!!
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Cloudsplitter by Russel Banks
Read by Pete Larkin
This novel presents a work of historical fiction about the life and family of John Brown, a man who declared war on the USA and ultimately met his demise by hanging after seizing the munitions factory at Harpers Ferry a few years before the start of the Civil War.
The story is told from the perspective of John’s son, Owen Brown, a furtive, lonely soul bound intractably in a strange love-hate relationship with his father.
John Brown the historical figure is revealed to be a man. Deeply devout, often contradictory and hypocritical, a father married twice who had to witness the death of 10 of his own children throughout his life.
I don’t know how appealing this book is to normal people. A lot of the story is about homesteading, actually. The Brown family is forced to pick up and move often, finally settling into the Adirondacks. The slow turn of the seasons brings new crops, fresh generations of sheep, cabins going up. Hides are tanned and sold to pay off debts that never subside. It is peaceful, in a way, but that peace sits uneasily against the backdrop of a political system preparing to explode.
The story has a lot to say about political violence. In the 19th century, Americans were grappling with a deeply divided congress over the twin issues of frontier expansion and the expansion of slavery with it. Does the institution of slavery justify violence? For John Brown and his family, the terrible job of fighting for the freedom of the enslaved black man seems unavoidable. The terrible purpose grows and grows until the first shot is finally fired. Tthe sentiments expressed throughout the novel are strangely very relatable, depsite taking place in a time period before instant communication over the internet. We are a people divided, both then and now.
Pete Larkin’s voice is deep as the earth. He is the perfect man to voice a devoted puritan farmer trying to do the lord’s work with his own two hands.
The future?
This year, I am already listening to a long podcast on the history of Taiwan. Not sure where else my interests will take me. All of the audio books from 2025 were so strange, yet they managed to fit together well. Good writing transcends genre! And a great reader can elevate any book into a masterpiece.