All Booked | All About Audiobooks

This edition of All Booked was originally emailed to subscribers on July 18, 2023. To receive our literary newsletter in your inbox, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Greetings!

I’m Jackson Friedman, the Independent’s Associate Editor. I’m filling in this week for Book Worm in Chief Emily Lee, who’s out on maternity leave.

I think I can trace my love of audiobooks back to the backseat of my mom’s car as we zipped around Santa Barbara, listening to a book on tape of Tomie dePaola’s children’s story Strega Nona. While the plot of this spaghetti-centric spin on the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” certainly captured my young imagination, what lingers in my memory to this day is the late, great comedic actor Dom DeLuise’s mellifluous narration. Some 30-odd years later, I can still hear him in my mind’s ear speak-singing the fairy tale’s central incantation: “Bubble, bubble pasta pot / Boil me some pasta nice and hot / I’m hungry and it’s time to sup / Boil me enough pasta to fill me up.” Now a parent myself, I try to channel some of his gusto whenever I read the board book to my young daughter (bedtime stories, of course, being one of the OG forms of audiobook).

Over the years, I’ve graduated from cassette tapes to cumbersome CD box sets to digital files downloaded to my smartphone (shoutout to library-friendly apps Libby and Hoopla!). And while the formats may have changed, a great story read by a gifted narrator (or cast of them) remains just as enchanting to me now as it was in my backseat days. I mean, what else can magically make doing the dishes less dreary, a bumper-to-bumper commute on the 101 more bearable, or a tired parent motivated enough to go on an extended walk at the end of a long day?

While I disagree with print puritans who maintain that audiobooks don’t “count” as reading, I will concede one drawback to consuming books aurally: I’ve found that when trying to share my enthusiasm for an audiobook I just couldn’t tear my ears away from, there exists no shorthand as perfectly evocative as the print-specific phrase “page-turner.” While I continue to hunt for an apt equivalent (“time-flier”? “earbud-gluer”? “commute-killer”?), here are a few audiobooks released in the last couple of years that I hope elevate your everyday as much as they did mine.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann; read by Dion Graham

Drawing largely from surviving crewmembers’ sometimes-conflicting first-hand accounts, The Lost City of Z author David Grann’s latest narrative nonfiction thriller chronicles a secret mission to intercept a treasure-filled Spanish galleon off the Chilean coast during the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear. Setting out from England in 1740 on the ill-fated voyage is a Royal Navy squadron that includes The Wager — a “tubby and unwieldy” merchant-ship-turned-man-of-war whose crew becomes shipwrecked on a desolate island off Patagonia. The well-researched, expertly told tale is read with dramatic flair by the golden-voiced Dion Graham, who delivers the book’s many cinematic moments with actorly aplomb. (Speaking of cinema, Martin Scorsese — whose sure-to-be-epic adaptation of Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon hits theaters this fall — is currently attached to direct an adaptation of The Wager.)