Usually I prefer to read on my Kindle so that I can export my highlights to a notes app and keep them. When I listen to an audiobook, I don’t have an easy way to keep notes from it, and if I listen at night I’ll probably fall asleep and miss six hours of it.
But sometimes an audiobook is the right choice. Celebrity memoirs are a great example. Usually you’re interested in the memoir because you’re already familiar with the celebrity, whether you’d consider yourself a fan or not. Audiobooks allow the memoirist to tell their story in their own voice, which often makes them better than the ebook or hardcover version.
So it’s no surprise that four of my favorite audiobooks from the past year have been celebrity memoirs.
I’m Glad My Mom Died (Jennette McCurdy)
This is one that my son was begging me to read for months when it came out. He’d grown up watching iCarly but he’s not much of a reader himself but he still recommended this one.
He was right. I listened to this in one afternoon and found it really powerful. I don’t know what was wrong with Jennette’s mom, but she definitely had issues. This was an example of a memoir being well-written and deeply thought through.
I take a longer look at the words on her headstone.
Brave, kind, loyal, sweet, loving, graceful, strong, thoughtful, funny, genuine, hopeful, playful, insightful, and on and on…
Was she, though? Was she any of those things? The words make me angry. I can’t look at them any longer.
Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?
Leslie F*cking Jones (Leslie Jones)
This is a perfect example of a book that works better as an audiobook. With a comedian, tone of voice is a big part of their communication. Plus, there’s an introduction and occasional commentary by Chris Rock, and you get to hear it in his own voice as well. This is conversational and makes it feel like Leslie Jones is your new bestie.
Some of the stories about my childhood is vague, because a bitch is 55 and I’ve smoked a lot of weed.
Greenlights (Matthew McConaughey)
I don’t even know how to describe Greenlights. Matthew McConaughey has been keeping a journal for decades and here he digs deep into it to share some truly bizarre memories and rambling thoughts about just about everything. I haven’t browsed the physical book so I don’t know what the layout looks like but I can’t imagine reading this in a traditional form. It’s full of asides and jokes and him laughing at his own jokes and occasionally shouting out, “Greenlight!!”
Catching greenlights is about skill: intent, context, consideration, endurance, anticipation, resilience, speed, and discipline. We can catch more greenlights by simply identifying where the red lights are in our life, and then change course to hit fewer of them.
All My Knotted-Up Life (Beth Moore)
I think I would have read this book as soon as it was released but I waited a bit for a superficial reason: I wasn’t a fan of the title. She explains the title right away but it’s still just not my favorite. The book, however, is great.
I left Christianity a long, long time ago when I was fresh out of college. I haven’t followed most Christian authors over the years (though I’ll read just about anything and sometimes this includes books about Christianity). One author in the Bible study genre that I always really loved was Beth Moore. I’d always imagined that if I’d had a Bible study teacher like her, a church mentor like her, even a friend or mom like her, I would have stayed in the church and probably become a Bible study teacher myself.
If the average Christian was anything like Beth Moore, most of us who left may have stayed.
I guess that’s why she was banished from the Southern Baptist denomination and public figures have called her life’s work “demonic.”
Sigh.
Of course someone who led and encouraged so many women was due to be taken down by the church leadership. Women are supposed to sit down and shut up, remember? Though Beth remained a Christian and now attends services at an Episcopalian church, her experience is a vivid reminder of why I wouldn’t want to go back to church. Ever.
(That’s not all that her book is about. It’s a full memoir with that being the part at the end. But it was the part that upset me the most).
It has been my observation that racism and sexism have an uncanny way of showing up together, like two fists on one body. The common denominator was clear as a bell from where I sat. It was superiority. I spoke out specifically to my own Southern Baptist world because I believed.
Beth deserves to speak a second quote.
All this time, I’d accepted the rampant sexism because I thought it was about Scripture. What I was watching in the wake of the report, however, did not appear to be a whit about Scripture, nor did it evidence fruit of the Holy Spirit, as far as I could discern. In my estimation, this thing playing out in front of the world was about power. This was about control. This was about the boys’ club.
How the Internet Happened (Brian McCullough)
Finally, I get to the only non-memoir audiobook on my list. This is not a memoir, it’s … a history of the internet. That’s totally different, because the internet didn’t write its own story. Brian McCullough did.
When I was in college, in the stone ages of 1993-97, the internet was in the process of going from something fringe to something BIG. It was at approximately the place that AI has been in the 2020s. In 1993, only a few people at Ohio State even knew the university had issued us email accounts. None of my roommates owned a computer (neither did I — I had a word processor by Brother than could hold documents of up to 25 pages). If we needed to use a computer, we spent some time in a place called the Computer Lab. By 1997, every dorm room had computers and they were all connected to the internet.
I was a telecommunications major, and I would leave my classes and excitedly tell my friends all the incredible things I was learning, only to be told that none of it was possible. It was like I was majoring in science fiction.
Most of my friends rented movies each weekend by going to Blockbuster and choosing a VHS tape. I knew one technophile who had an expensive laser disc player. Movies were on discs larger than dinner plates and the disc needed to be changed halfway through. When I told him that they were going to start putting movies on discs the size of CDs, he mansplained to me that a CD is not large enough to hold as much information as a movie contains. If people were skeptical that DVDs were possible, how would anyone believe that we’d be streaming movies on our phones? People were already doubting that anyone would want the news to be online because they liked holding a newpaper in their hand while they drank their coffee.
How the Internet Happened is the story of the last thirty years. We’ve all lived through some of it, some of us have lived through all of it, but sometimes it’s mind-boggling to step back and take a look at the history of it. This book discusses the origins of internet browsers, search engines, ecommerce, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the handheld devices we all use now.
Whether it’s a story you’re intimately familiar with or only vaguely knowledgeable about, if you love the internet, you’ll probably be fascinated by this book.
Silicon Valley has always been equal parts egghead libertarianism and acid-tinged hippie romanticism. Both of these worldviews mesh quite well actually when it comes to believing that technology can be used to better mankind and free it from all manner of oppression, repression and just everyday drudgery. The Internet was another in a long line of technological miracles that many believed would elevate minds and free souls from all sorts of impediments. For the libertarians the Internet was great because it had few rules and no governance. For the hippies, the Internet promised free expression and a democratization of ideas.
So those are some of my favorite audiobooks that I’ve listened to recently. What are some of yours? Recommend them in the comments. I’m always looking for something new to listen to.
Deana Birks 