★Waiting for Tom Hanks
In this charmingly sweet romance from Kerry Winfrey, a lovable aspiring screenwriter named Annie Cassidy is obsessed with Nora Ephron movies and finding her own Tom Hanks. To Annie, Tom Hanks—the star of several of Ephron’s most beloved romantic comedies—represents her dream man. He’s an everyman who believes in love at first sight and maybe even lives on a houseboat à la Sleepless in Seattle. In contrast, Annie lives with her Dungeons & Dragons-loving uncle, and her dating prospects are looking grim. When a movie production takes over her neighborhood, it brings with it several men who vie for her attention. Will she end up with the grip who checks all her boxes, or with the handsome movie star she keeps bumping into but couldn’t possibly have a chance with? With fun, engaging narration from Rachel L. Jacobs, Waiting for Tom Hanks is a pure delight from beginning to end.
Out East
Out East is a memoir about one summer in the Long Island beach town of Montauk, where John Glynn, his friends and some loose acquaintances go in together on a summer home. Glynn feels like the odd man out in a group mostly populated by women, gay men and Wall Street bros. But as feelings develop for one of his new friends, it turns out he might fit in better than he thought. Glynn has a knack for details, is skilled at place-setting and displays a true love of language, which he deploys effortlessly. It’s a small, personal story about Glynn figuring out who he truly is over one wild summer of weekends away from the city. Michael Crouch lends an earnestness to the narration. As focused as the story is, he makes everything feel big and new.
The Lesson
A strong debut from Cadwell Turnbull, The Lesson does what all the best science fiction does: It uses the supernatural to reveal something true about our world. The book is set in the U.S. Virgin Islands five years after the Ynaa, an advanced alien race, arrived to study humans. The Ynaa live mostly peacefully with humans, at least for the time being. Most people are willing to put up with the occasional killing at the hands of the Ynaa in exchange for their science and medicine, but eventually enough is enough. Narrators Janina Edwards and Ron Butler do a fantastic job setting us in the islands, and their accents draw extra attention to the colonial elements of alien invasion that mirror our own history. It’s worth a listen for anyone with an interest in sci-fi.
Of all the quarantine reading and listening I’ve done, no audiobook has inspired more people to ask me for more information than You Never Forget Your First, Alexis Coe’s myth-busting biography of George Washington. Coe contextualizes and humanizes Washington’s victories and losses on the battlefield, his many (many) illnesses, his politics and home life in a whole new way, and it’s made all the more accessible by Brittany Pressley’s wry, clear narration. Most importantly, you’ll explore the hypocrisy in Washington’s fight for liberation from British rule while keeping black people enslaved. For readers interested in thinking critically about American history, this is a good start.
I didn’t think it was possible to be more chained to my phone—and thus, more uncomfortable with my relationship to social media—but here we are in a pandemic, and nearly all our social interactions are now on screens. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing has helped temper those feelings by providing guidance to resist the guilt of feeling unproductive and the demands on our attention. I find Rebecca Gibel’s narration to be hypnotic in its dryness, allowing me to reprioritize and realign where I give my focus.
My thoughts have increasingly strayed to the week each year my family spends at a condo on the Florida gulf—specifically, to the books I read on last summer’s trip, one of which was Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, which feels like an Aaron Sorkin production with the more melodramatic moments of “The Crown.” When I decided to reexperience it via the audiobook, I’m not sure whether I was motivated by a desire to return to the world McQuiston’s ebullient romance between the president’s son and an English prince, to return to the beach itself or to transport myself to a happy moment in a simpler time. Probably a bit of all three. Regardless, the absorbing and rapid-fire story, paired with Ramón de Ocampo’s warm, exuberant narration (and fantastic British accent, when performing Prince Henry’s lines) made for the perfect, swoonworthy escape.
Ninth House is an addicting mystery set at a magical secret society at Yale University, author Leigh Bardugo’s alma mater. Narrators Lauren Fortgang and Michael David Axtell alternate between Galaxy “Alex” Stern and Daniel “Darlington” Arlington; of the two, Fortgang is the standout. Her performance is as sharp as Alex herself, who’s been through a lot before arriving at Yale. Scenes where Alex lets her rage and trauma surface are riveting as Fortgang snarls and performs through clenched teeth. Fortgang’s visceral performance of Alex’s anger makes the rare moments of genuine affection that Alex permits herself—particularly toward Hellie, a close friend, and Pamela Dawes, the society’s in-house researcher—moving in their tenderness, as Fortgang softens her voice to convey Alex’s vulnerability. Anyone looking to be swept up in a story of dark magic in which nothing is as it seems should give Ninth House a try.
I read a hard copy of Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy when it came out in 2018 and loved it—in that had-to-lie-down-for-two-and-a-half-hours-afterward kind of way. (The book is aptly named.) When my professor assigned it for a graduate class I took this spring, I decided to give the award-winning audiobook a try for my second reading. Hearing Laymon’s words in his own voice was even more affecting than reading them on the page. In the audio version, you get the full playfulness of he and LaThon’s middle school riffing on words like “galore” (gal-low), “meager” (mee-guh) and “y’all don’t even know.” You also hear the full tenderness of Laymon’s conversations with his mother, in which they try to tell each other the truth about addiction, abuse, deception and love. When I finished listening to Heavy this time, I still had to lie down afterward to digest its contents—white supremacy, disordered eating and violence against Black Americans, among other things—but since a late afternoon stress-nap was already a staple in my quarantine routine, it turned out to be a perfect pandemic listen.
I was two chapters into my hardcover of Trick Mirror when the audiobook became available to check out from the library. (Apparently, I had placed it on hold during pre-COVID times and then, along with all the other trappings of normal life, forgot about it.) Jia Tolentino’s nuanced essays are the sort of reading you want to absorb every word of, so I wasn’t sure the audiobook would be the best fit. But out of curiosity (and a desire to make good on the library’s monthslong waitlist), I checked it out and grabbed my headphones. Next thing I knew, I was three hours in and plumbing the depths of my to-do list for more things to work on so I could keep listening. With an engaging balance between the personal and the reported, Tolentino’s exacting explorations of feminism, the internet and the self lend themselves nicely to audio, as it turns out. And as for my to-do list, her intellectual, no-frills narration provided the perfect soundtrack for taking a walk, doing the dishes, brushing the cats, making banana bread and mending that tear in my duvet cover.
