Michele Cobb's Reading List

"With Andy Weir, you’re always going to get a great story, and then a little bit of science. The reason I like his books is because they’ve also got a great sense of humor. It starts with someone who is a survivor in a spacecraft who doesn’t remember anything—what a great setup! Then you’ve got lots of characters involved in the tale. So Ray Porter, who narrates the book, gets to play and have fun with a great text with a sense of humor, and then do a lot of different characters. I do. I’m more of a thriller person, but that’s one of the reasons I really love audiobooks. I’m much more willing to be experimental with audio. I tend to read thrillers and some literary fiction with my eyes, but not much nonfiction or science fiction. I listen to a lot of things that I don’t read with my eyes (which doesn’t mean I don’t listen to a lot of thrillers too). With audio, I’m more willing to give myself over to what the narrator’s doing, especially with science fiction where, oftentimes, there are made up words. With my eyes, I’ll just skip over those. I like listening to science fiction because the narrator does some of the work for me. Yes, you’re not just going to sit down for five minutes and listen to it. It’s a commitment, although not as long as one of the others we’re going to be talking about today. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

"Yes, and it is book one—so he hasn’t made it through everything yet. Luckily, he’s a fantastic narrator. It is wonderful to hear his words about his life: as a young person with Michelle, all the things that he’s dealing with as president. But it is 29 hours, so you have to be aware that there’s going to be a lot of listening, and that there’s more to come in the future. Yes, absolutely. One of the fun things that I get to do as someone who interacts with a lot of the publishers, is one day I was on a meeting for the Audio Publishers Association, and the producer of this audiobook was there. We had a meeting that was allotted an hour. We had about 15 minutes of material, and then he spent the other 45 minutes talking about what it was like to record Obama out on Martha’s Vineyard. It was really fun to hear about that experience. Yes, at least. It will have gone through three rounds of listening. What’s fun about this particular category is that we actually bring in some celebrity judges, people who are coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. This category is about ‘What would entice someone to listen to more?’ And you can see that there’s some great selections here for that."

"Dave Grohl is part of the band Foo Fighters. People really expected a lot of stuff about his life now, but he doesn’t really deal with that in the book. He’s really talking about his career and the whole space. It’s less intimate than some autobiographies are, but he does a great job. He is very jovial, is the word that I would use. He seems like a warm human being, as you listen to this book. Again, it’s not super short, it’s 10 hours. It’s less life tips and more actual memoir. I do think that is a phenomenon, where it becomes more a business or personal development book than autobiography, but that is not the case here."

"It was a big hit, because it was also an Oprah’s Book Club pick. It’s about late Civil War-era Georgia, so you’re dealing with a lot of different themes here. There is a lot of heavy stuff in this book. William DeMeritt is just so fantastic as a narrator. This is a great example—much like with Hail Mary and Ray Porter—of how, when you have a strong text and a fantastic narrator, it elevates the work even more. It’s about two brothers who have been emancipated and are coming to work on a farm with another family. It’s a lot about family relationships and there is a lot of interpersonal stuff within the historical fiction."

"My fifth choice I think works really well when we’re talking about the world of the pandemic. It’s called All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle and read by Ben Onwukwe. I love the setup of this. It’s about an older man, he’s a widower. He’s kind of making up his life when he talks to his daughter—so that she doesn’t think that he is lonely. Of course, it turns out he is. But he starts to get to know his neighbors and becomes involved in a community. It’s just a really warm story. It was kind of hopeful in the pandemic, when I wasn’t seeing very many people, to listen to this particular book. It really is. I very much enjoyed the narrator; I had not listened to anything from him before. That made it really a fun experience. It’s always great when you discover someone who you didn’t know, doing a fantastic job. I see a lot more new voices coming into the space as well. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There are 25 categories: fiction, nonfiction, young adult, children’s…If you go to AudioFile Magazine, you’ll see all the categories and a review of shortlisted books that AudioFile has put together , as well as a sound clip. It’s a great place to get some ideas for listening. Because these aren’t brand new, it’s a great place to go and ask, ‘Ooh, what have I missed?. There’s some definite fun standouts in there. That’s exactly right. Most categories have five finalists, so you’ve got a lot to choose from, but it’s also very targeted. If you go to https://www.audiopub.org/ you can actually watch the Audies online on Friday, March 4th, 2022 at 9pm Eastern time, 6pm Pacific time. I hope people will watch either live, or if you don’t want to stay up late, it’ll still be there after. Part of the best books of 2022 series"

"It does, but I really think of Piranesi as a fantasy book because it’s about this man who’s living in a maze. He is talking to statues and interacting with them and he has someone that comes and visits him once or twice a week. He’s also on a journey of self-discovery. He’s peeling back the layers of his life. It’s not an easy book to explain in a single paragraph and I think one of the reasons that the audio is so successful is that the book itself is very dense. You’re trying to figure out what’s going on and the narrator actually puts together some of the thinking for you. He’s helping to lead you on that path which may be a little bit more difficult to follow when you’re reading with your eyes. He’s giving it some context and some framing and helping you understand what’s happening. It’s really a transformative performance of a very interesting book with some great writing in it. It’s that thing that comes together when you’ve got great writing and great narration. It just really makes you sit and listen. It’s a seven-hour book, and it was hard for me to walk away from it, because I was trying to figure out what was going on, to peel back the layers of the onion, and work out the maze. It really sucked me in. First of all, fantastic performance. It’s really got to have a great narration style and it’s got to be a fantastic listening experience so if someone has never listened to an audiobook before, and they want to have one experience, this is what audiobook of the year is about: listening to something and really getting involved in the format because of that performance. Generally, of course, the writing of the book has to be very strong in order for the performance to be very strong. Also, for audiobook of the year in particular—and this is not true of the other categories—they do take a look at sales and marketing and try to see whether the book had some kind of impact on the industry at large. It’s all so complicated. It’s all about figuring it out. I have trouble talking about this book because you don’t want to say too much and you also can’t really say a little. Just go listen, have the experience, and get your understanding of it–which I think is a bit different for each person. I did hear a lot of people loving the writing of this book but struggling when reading it with their eyes. It’s similar to a book last year which was tough for people to read with their eyes. But when you hear it with your ears, you get a little bit more context. I think this is a good example of that. That’s what’s fun about audio, that there are so many times where it is a slightly different experience. The performer really adds to the experience. I can think of many books that I was not successful reading with my eyes and then went to the audiobook and thought, ‘How did I not love this in print?’ It’s the little extras in there that help you."

"Yes, Laurence Fishburne reads this and I really feel like he should read more audiobooks. He probably is not going to find a ton of time in his schedule to do this, but I think we saw with the pandemic some performers who normally do television, film and stage had some extra time and in his case he read a couple of audiobooks. This is one of them. For me, this text was so important when I was growing up. I read it and got a sense of a political stance which, growing up in New Hampshire, was not something that I was exposed to. So the text was really powerful on its own and then to have his powerful voice, not imitating Malcolm X but giving you a sense of him, it really made an impactful listen. It did win two Audies because, again, it’s taking something that’s really strong in the written word and adding a really strong layer of performance. That’s almost impossible to beat. Not at all. He really gets it. He really gives you the emotional sense of anger in there without it being over the top. He gives you the background of what it was like for Malcolm X growing up and where all of these things were coming from. I really felt like it filled out the history. I remembered reading it with my eyes, I remembered seeing the movie, but this was somehow a more complete experience than either of those things. I got into the text a bit more. I find generally, with nonfiction, when I read with my eyes, I might speed it up and skip over some things, but here you hear the words pronounced and really focus in. There were some moments I rewound and listened to a few paragraphs again because I was like, ‘I’m not sure I got that. Let me really dig into this.’ So it’s hats off to Laurence Fishburne and whoever directed him because they did a nice job of finding the beats. Malcolm X didn’t have a smooth upbringing. He was involved in things that were less than legal and it was only slightly later in his life that he became involved in Islam and became a political figure. He wasn’t starting from a privileged position with a background in politics. He really came from a tough upbringing and used that fire and that experience to lead people and inspire them to make changes in their own life. It really does."

"This is by N.K. Jemisin. It’s from an original story that she had written which was then made into a book. It’s about the city breaking down its boroughs into avatars so someone gets to be the Bronx and someone gets to be Manhattan and someone gets to be Queens. So you have this opportunity to do a lot of vocal things that are very interesting. Robin Miles, the narrator, is the kind of person who goes around and gathers human experience and conversation. So she’ll meet someone and she might hear them talk and she’ll put that into her consciousness and use it later in a character. I think she really got to do a lot of that here, where she’s playing women and men from a variety of economic and racial backgrounds and she’s playing an avatar, so it’s like being online and having this persona. I wouldn’t say she’s over the top at all but she’s having a good time with these various characters. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book itself is dealing with New York and these struggles and fights New York is going through. It was written prior to COVID-19 but has a lot of parallel themes, of the city struggling with something. It was great listening. Again, it won in two categories because the text is awesome, the narration is awesome and you bring it together and suddenly you just can’t stop listening."

"This book brings together a newer narrator and a newer author which sometimes allows you to go in different directions in a way that you would not expect. The book itself is about a young woman who is babysitting. She’s African American and she’s babysitting a child who’s white. She takes the child, late in the evening, to a grocery store and is basically accused of potentially kidnapping the child. It’s a racial incident that we certainly have been seeing in the US. This young lady goes through this experience and then has to return and deal with many different elements. How does she deal with the parents of the child after this? How does she deal with the child? How does it impact her choices in her life, because she wasn’t necessarily deciding to be a babysitter for the rest of her life? There are a lot of elements of what it means to be a young person and to be struggling with your identity, with your economic situation. So it’s very layered, which requires a layered and subtle performance. If you go over the top with these emotional issues it can actually stop the reader from really hearing what is happening, because you just get sucked into a performance as opposed to getting emotionally pulled through the story. And that’s what Nicole Lewis is really good at. She’s finding those emotional moments and getting you super-involved in the character. But she has to play all the characters. She’s also got to play this privileged woman whose child has been sucked into the situation, who isn’t necessarily thinking about what it’s like to be the babysitter and get pulled up by the police and have people in the store attacking her. You’ve got to play these two totally different characters, and they have to be believable. And I think she found an excellent balance of not making the privileged mother of the child a caricature, but really filling out who that person is, finding the humour, making her understandable enough to not dislike her. It’s an important balance. Exactly. And, you know, it is hard for those of us who are not necessarily in a position of privilege, especially economically, to understand someone else’s pain, or someone else’s struggle. Those are different struggles and they can be non-sympathetic, but I think Nicole Lewis did a great job of making both characters understandable, sympathetic and also not shying away from their foibles. It makes this book a very good listen. Again, it wasn’t a particularly short book, but it was one that was inspirational to me to go out and walk. I was constantly like, ‘Oh, I want to keep listening to that.’ So I did a lot of walking when I was listening to this title."

"This is a celebrity biography. It’s Alicia Keys talking about her life and she gets all sorts of celebrities, like Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama, to do these little interstitial moments. I have to say, I’m always a little bit nervous with celebrity biography. You want to know about their lives but, half the time, it’s not really that exciting. They haven’t really had that many struggles. But with Alicia Keys, first of all, I thought it was super-interesting. She was talking about her upbringing. Again, she wasn’t coming from a position of privilege, but she had been taught really well to stand up for herself. Here she is, becoming a celebrity, and ending up in these positions where it’s hard to speak up for yourself. I appreciated that on that journey she was taking us through what she had learned, and encouraging the listener to speak out, to take ownership of who you are and your needs at any moment. Plus, she has an amazing voice, speaking as well as singing. There is some singing in the book. I remember last year, with this book, she was one of the people that I wanted to listen to, whatever the text was, because her voice is really good. With author performers, oftentimes, they don’t really get all the subtleties. They don’t get all the emotional beats of a title. They might be more on one level than a professional narrator who puts a lot of up and down in the text and in the tone. Alicia Keys was really good at manipulating her voice so it didn’t sound as one note. Even in the quiet moments, it didn’t all sound the same. That’s really important for me as a listener, so that I don’t tune out. I really stay with listening to everything that she’s saying because she’s finding those vocal peaks and valleys. That’s a struggle for someone who does not narrate an audiobook on a regular basis. It’s not an easy skill. People want to read their own stories, but it doesn’t necessarily make for fantastic listening. In this case she did it. She had a great director, I’m sure, and it made a compelling listen for a number of reasons. Yes, I’m sucked into a story of a woman finding her own voice, absolutely. It helps when you are finding your own way in life—as opposed to dropping into it. If you’re the child of a Hollywood star, you don’t have a lot to get through and learn, necessarily. Alicia Keys had a lot of different things to learn. She obviously has a ton of talent and a ton of skill but it’s learning a whole new language almost, and about a whole new society. She’s done that very successfully. For me, not always. It’s great to hear Tina Fey or Rob Lowe reading their own story, because there’s enough humor in them, enough things of interest. A lot of times I find the memoir of someone I’m not that familiar with not very successful for me, as a listener. Maybe if I was more involved in liking that celebrity or in a particular topic. I do want some drama, I want some lessons learned. Oftentimes in Hollywood at least, I don’t know that there are that many lessons learned, but maybe I’m just jaded. But whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I do generally prefer a professional narrator doing a title so I can get the full performance. I’m a big fan—both in print and with my ears—of thrillers. I like blood and guts and gore. It’s good for taking me out of my own life, on some level. I’m not a big reader of nonfiction at all with my eyes, so if I’m going down the nonfiction path I’m definitely going to turn to audio because the narrator helps me focus, I don’t skip over pieces as much. I’m an auditory learner so if you’re trying to teach me something, you’ve got to tell me."

"This is about a very fun character. She’s called Vera Wong and she runs Vera Wang’s Tea House in San Francisco. That’s on purpose: she wants to ghost off the name Vera Wang—but her teahouse is not very successful. She comes down one morning and there is a dead body. She sets out to figure out who the murderer is. She works through four different suspects—you’ve got the journalists, the brother of the dead man, his widow—and she gets to know each of them. She’s really trying to figure out who did it by inserting herself in their lives, which is a unique way to approach solving a mystery. Eunice Wong, who reads the book, does a marvelous job. There is a lot of accent work. There’s something about the way she captures each of these characters that really drove it home for me. She’s having a good time. She’s got the annoying son; she’s got the two podcasters. She’s really relishing those characters so any moments in which I might be taken out of the book, she’s dragging me back in. It’s really a master class in characterization and narration, that keeps things moving along. When I finished the book I thought, ‘Oh she’s got to solve another mystery and they’ve got to get Eunice to narrate it!’ It’s that marriage of a great text and a great narrator that I always talk about. It’s a very good example of that."

"This book kicks off in the time of Covid . You’ve got all these doctors not knowing what is going on. They’re from all over the country and they’re texting each other on this text chain. What struck me about this book is how well-written it is. It drops us into the fact that there are things which are broken in the American healthcare system. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The doctor does a nice job of taking us through what’s happening, but also his career and his insider take on healthcare, which is really fascinating. It’s incredibly disheartening, but he is able to talk about mistakes that he has made and how important communication is with the patient. He really makes you feel something for the doctor within the system because, oftentimes, when you ’re receiving healthcare, you’re just feeling frustration. It’s slow, no one is telling you what is going on. To get the doctor perspective was fantastic. He doesn’t narrate the book. He reads a little bit at the beginning, which is cool to hear but I don’t think I could survive it for six hours. Thank goodness they had a professional narrator because there is so much empathy and emotion required with this book. The narrator, Aden Hakimi, really captures that. He does an amazing job. I think he would be fine, he just wouldn’t be able to capture the emotional spark. It can be very difficult in a nonfiction book, finding the emotional storyline. We totally get it here. We think about, ‘How do doctors protect people?’ In terms of Covid, they didn’t just have to think about the patients, they had to think about themselves and their families. They didn’t want to bring the disease home. It brought these layers that are very timely and made the book extremely memorable."

"This one was fun for me because I love a good mystery, but it also has a true crime podcast focus. It’s about a woman who is a podcaster. She went to high school in New Hampshire—a made-up boarding school—and she returns to teach some classes. It turns out a student had been murdered while she was there and someone who worked at the college was convicted of the murder. Now as a teacher, with her students, she reinvestigates, ‘What actually happened to her classmate? What happened to the person who was ultimately convicted of her murder?’ It was an intriguing listen. The main character’s life is a mess. Her husband is going through a scandal. You’ve got the layers of the mystery, her personal life and her returning to a place where she didn’t have the best experience. Julia Whelan, the narrator, does a fantastic job. There’s also a very small piece done by JD Jackson, who plays the convicted killer and speaks to her from jail."

"How often is it that books have people whose lives are a mess? Here’s another one. It’s about a lawyer. She has a messy life. She goes on a date, moves in with the guy, and gets sucked into his life in Brooklyn and ends up in a gun cult. I like that true crime aspect to things. It’s a work of fiction, but here she is, in a bad relationship. She doesn’t realize she’s come into a survivalist group and some problems are going to arise from this. How does she get her life back? Bahni Turpin narrated this, which for me closed the deal. Yes, Bahni Turpin is fantastic. I think of her as being a strong person. It was interesting to have someone who in my mind’s eye is really together playing a lawyer who’s like, ‘I’ve fallen in love with a guy and now I’m living with him and I’ve been sucked into something.’ It happens over time, so she doesn’t really realize that everything has fallen apart in her life. To hear someone like Bahni, with that strong voice, crumbling was really fascinating. There are survivalist cults everywhere! This one just happens to be in Brooklyn."

"It is funny, but it is surprisingly empathetic. It’s about a family of real estate moguls. They’ve got three kids and you’re hearing the perspective of the two daughters and the daughter-in-law. One daughter has gone off on her own, she’s married a successful businessman and she is not involved in the family business or working. The other daughter is taking the family’s money but is working for nonprofits doing good works. Then you’ve got the daughter-in-law, who is married to the son who works in the family business. She is a graphic designer from Rhode Island (where I live) and gives her perspective on this family. It’s full of privilege. None of the characters should be likeable, but yet somehow they are. This is a beach read in that it’s quick, fun, and fluffy. People aren’t learning a ton, but they are redeemable. Marin Ireland, the narrator, is a Golden Voice for AudioFile —newly crowned. She takes the heightened emotion out. She can make someone sound empathetic and yet tired and resigned to what’s happening. Even if they’re an unlikable character, the way she voices them makes them more relatable. She makes them seem like they are going through something that you can sympathize with. Somehow, she brings sympathy to characters that are not sympathetic. I don’t know how she does it."

"Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe is a graphic novel that was adapted into a full cast performance. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to chat with the author and illustrator Maia Kobabe, who also narrated, and Nick Martorelli from Penguin Random House, who worked together with Maia on adapting it. It’s a fun story in many ways, because Maia is revisiting coming to terms with being non-binary a decade later. So having more time and more experience layered on top of that acceptance of self and this coming out of self is interesting. It allowed them to make some changes in the original text: not just to convert it to the audio format, but also to recognize a little bit of where they are today versus where they were when it was originally written. Yes, because they’ve got to take the amazing illustrations and put them into the audio soundscape, so that you understand what is happening. They’ve done that with music, with sound effects, with silence at times, and a full cast. Maia gets to play Maia, and Maia’s sibling is also in the piece. They have also come out as they. Then there are audiobook narrators playing parents and other characters, including Trini Alvarado, someone who Maia—who is an audiobook listener—had listened to and was excited about."

"Whoopi Goldberg many of us know as a comedian and an actor—movies like Ghost and Color Purple . She is now also a talk show host. But I didn’t really think about her life and background too much. What was lovely about Bits and Pieces is that she’s talking about her mother and her brother, who she was close to, and who have both passed away. So, she’s talking about her grief, but it was such a hopeful, wonderful experience to listen to. She had such love and respect and holds them in a lovely place. She talks about her childhood, which wasn’t free of challenges. Her mother’s life was really difficult. She didn’t know that her mother was sent away for a mental illness for a while. When she returned, she had memory loss, she couldn’t really understand her relationship with her kids, but she faked it till she made it on some level. What I really enjoyed about this listening experience was that Whoopi sounded so natural. You can hear her laugh, you can hear her have these reactions—and she just sounds like she’s telling you a story and discovering the words as she goes along, which is unusual. It didn’t feel as if it was written, if that makes sense. It’s got some funny parts and it’s got some emotionally intense parts, but I took away from it more joy than anything else."

"It is twisty. Dan Stevens—of Downton Abbey fame—narrates the main character, a doctor who is trying to bring some new techniques to wake up a “sleeping beauty” who may have committed a crime. He’s experimenting with all these things to wake up the woman who has had an emotionally overwhelming experience. They want to wake her up so that she can be prosecuted. You really have to pay attention to what is happening, because…I don’t want to say too much, but it’s so twisty and turny. When I finished it, I almost wanted to go back and start again and see if I could figure it out. Where were all the Easter eggs that gave me the clues? I was going, ‘What? Oh, wait! What?’ throughout. So, if you like a good psychological thriller that isn’t necessarily going to go where you thought it would, this is a great option. And it’s got all the different narrators playing the different parts. They’re not really interacting, but you’re getting their different perspectives in an excellent way. No, not cheery escapism, but psychological twists and turns, yes. It’s definitely dark—I like dark things."

"I am clearly into twisty mysteries that don’t really tell me where they’re going. This one is all about running cons. The main character is a con artist, who is in small-time cons. She gets involved with a group that runs much bigger, longer-term cons, and ultimately gets involved with a man through one of these cons. You really must pay attention. Is she going to be in trouble with the main person who is running this con group? That’s a big issue. I love strategy and strategy games. This one was completely for me because I was constantly thinking, ‘Who’s playing who?’ Yes, Saskia Maarleveld, who is fantastic. She gets to play these dark characters who are trying to one up each other. She plays the role of the main character, but also the role of the main character who is playing someone else in a con. So, there are a lot of layers to this. She was just great."

"This one is about Doug, a widower from the Boston area, and his seven-year-old son. They are trying to deal with their grief—the loss of a wife and mother—by going on a sojourn to New Hampshire, and suddenly the world kind of ends. No one really knows what has happened, and they can’t communicate with the outside world. There seem to be fires that are happening down below, and they are unsure of what to do. Has there been a political disaster? Have nuclear bombs dropped? What is going on? They go further into the wilderness, essentially to keep away from whatever is happening where there are more humans. They must survive through this year—the man and his son together. Now I should say that their survival is not like The Road by Cormac McCarthy . They have food, they have shelter. It’s more, ‘If it’s just you and your seven-year-old kid, what are you teaching them, if you don’t know what’s gone on? How, when someone new comes along, are you interacting with that person?’ Again, it is very psychological and emotional. That is what I liked about it. It is a quiet, post-apocalyptic novel, although we do not even know if it’s post-apocalyptic because we don’t know what’s happened. Robert Fass is fantastic playing the father and son. You do not want to overplay being a seven-year-old. It is very subtle what he does. You just go along the emotional journey with him. For me, hearing his voice and hearing what the father was feeling, Robert just did that perfectly. He captured those intense emotions in a quiet way that didn’t outstrip what the words were doing, but really sucked me in. Dark, but not horribly dark. He and his son have been put up with this big challenge, but they are also trying to work through their grief. They are able to get past that grief, in a way. He gains as a character throughout the challenge here as well."