Robin Whitten's Reading List

"The first one I wanted to talk about is Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald, who is British. She’s a naturalist and a scientist and observer and has written several books that she has narrated as audiobooks: she reads her own. Vesper Flights is a collection of more than 30 essays and there’s something really compelling about her narration of these stories. Some of them are very personal. Some of them are just wonderful observations about nature, natural things, and particularly birds—she’s also the author of H is for Hawk . “We want to make sure that each book is a brilliant listening experience. That’s what it’s about” They’re short listening. I would say that probably each one of the stories is less than an hour, which makes for an interesting type of audiobook. I found them very contemplative. They were an escape, in the sense that they take you away. They make you think about something that is not in this world or at least not in your own world around you right this minute. That’s one of the things that I loved about them. She does. She has a style that’s a little bit conversational, in a way, but she’s also quite precise about her observations. So, as a naturalist, she tells you about what she sees in the natural world, whether it’s about birds’ nests or a garden or something else. She’s precise, but she has a very engaging way of telling you about it, as if she were sitting with you saying, ‘I saw the most amazing thing! This is what I observed and this is what it made me think of.’ She takes you with her."

"So now for something totally different, let’s talk about The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. I wouldn’t say The Sandman is a comfort read! The Sandman is an audio adaption of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series. The graphic novels are not new—they’ve been ongoing for many years—but the series has been adapted by Dirk Maggs and performed with this incredible cast that’s led by James McAvoy. Neil is in it—who is of course a wonderful storyteller himself—Michael Sheen, Taron Egerton, Bebe Neuwirth, Andy Serkis. It’s a great cast and the adaption that Dirk Maggs did is brilliant. If you’re not familiar with him, he was a collaborator with Douglas Adams on all The Hitchhiker’s Guides . So he has done many different adaptions and productions of audio drama and this is quite something. It’s dark, it’s very mysterious, but it’s very engrossing as a listening experience. It was too scary for me, but I loved the audio experience of it. It is and it’s also in the long British tradition of radio plays. This is the top of the art form in terms of that kind of adaption, with every detail—the sound, the sound effects, the music—everything is beautifully orchestrated and brilliantly done."

"This is by Emma Donoghue and read by Emma Lowe. I like Emma Donoghue’s novels a lot. This one is a bit different. She had done some research about the 1918 flu epidemic and then, earlier this year, with everything that was going on, she felt that this was the time to publish the story. It’s set around a Dublin maternity ward over just a few days in 1918. Three women from very different classes have to come together to help patients who are having babies at a time when the flu is going on around them. To me, it seemed so much like what is going on in the world now. To have this view of a medical facility, the challenges that the women had—the doctor, the nurse and the aide, the young woman who helps them—and there’s the politics all woven into it. It just resonated with me. It was 100 years ago, but there’s a lot that was very similar. It’s unfortunately staying very relevant. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And Emma Lowe is brilliant in her narration. She had to have three women from different backgrounds with different types of voices. There’s lots of conversation among them, and among the women patients. It’s very hard to pull off as an audiobook. They do and they have to make sure that they’re getting the right accent in a conversation where it may not say, ‘Bridie said’ or ‘Kathleen said.’ They’ve got to parse it out and these brilliant narrators do that in real time, as they’re reading it. They’ve gone over it before, but they are changing their voices and the performance from character to character as they go."

"Now, this is interesting because Roger Clark, who is an American-Irish-British actor, has to use all of that in this story, which is about an American cop who has left Chicago and gone to a rural Irish village, presumably to get away from everything. That’s not how it works out, as you know. Roger Clark has to be an American and then we have all of the Irish villagers. It’s a great story with wonderful suspense. It lends itself extremely well to audio and Roger Clark does a beautiful job. Oftentimes any kind of suspense or mystery works extremely well on audio. In this case, Roger Clark doesn’t give anything away—although Tana French does a little bit. There’s a lot of suspense and then there’s a big twist that has to be handled fairly carefully by a narrator, because it’s not just in the writing: you have characters, you’ve got voices. So it’s fascinating what Roger does. He does it very well. There have been comparisons, that The Searcher is like an American Western. Either I don’t know much about American Westerns or it just didn’t connect on that level for me. It seemed to me like an Irish story, about everybody knowing so much back history about everybody else in the village and in the area. Roger Clark has a great voice for this, he’s a great American cop. In the mystery category, there were a couple of others that I wanted to mention. One is All the Devils are Here , which is by Louise Penny. For the American audience, it’s read by Robert Bathurst. He’s been reading that series for American audiences for several years and does a great job. We have a wonderful podcast interview with him about doing the series, which is why I was excited about it. However, in the UK, Adam Sims is the narrator of the Louise Penny series. It’s still a great story and I’m sure it’s good because the story is so good but I can’t listen to it. Yes, The Splendid and the Vile , which is the Erik Larson book about Winston Churchill and his family. In the US, it’s narrated by John Lee, who is British. Another mystery that I could have talked about is One by One by Ruth Ware. We love Imogen Church who is a British narrator and has done all of Ruth’s other titles. We’ve done interviews with her . She’s fabulous and it’s a great story."

"This was a very important audiobook to me this year. It’s written by Arshay Cooper and read by Adam Lazarre-White, who does a beautiful job. So it’s a memoir but it’s not read by the author. The story is about the first American all-Black high school rowing team. I was thinking about why I loved the title and listening to it, but then I suddenly thought that of course Britain has an amazing tradition of rowing! So this is a title which is a lot about rowing and the team, the building of the team and what the team meant to all these young athletes. It’s a great story for your audience to be interested in. My husband was an oarsman so I’ve gotten it for him. The story is mostly set in Chicago, at a high school on the West Side which is very poor, with lots of violence outside of school and disrupted homes. They have sports, but they’ve never had rowing. Then, in 1998, a man decided that the high school needed a rowing team and brought a shell into the high school cafeteria. Now, these students had never seen a rowing shell. They had never seen a rowing race. Some of them had probably never even been near the water, except maybe the Chicago River. The whole concept of this as a sport they didn’t know about. The wonderful thing that Arshay says is that many of the students just turned up to find out about the team because they offered pizza. The draw was a free pizza lunch. Then they recruited these athletes and trained them. They came from very different backgrounds, with tremendous challenges for being on the team, for showing up. But it worked. They were champions and many overcame their disadvantages—because they were so satisfied with this accomplishment that it served as a stepping-stone for many of them to change the way their lives had been going. What’s interesting is that this is not a new book. The reason it came out as an audiobook is that there was just a documentary made about the team , of their coming together again and rowing for the Chicago Sprints and about where their lives took them. It’s about how much the training and the motivation that came from the coach and the sponsor of the team helped change their lives, including Arshay Cooper who has gone on helping young people get motivated and get out of the lives they want to change. I think this is a beautiful representation and inspiration for believing that that can happen. Adam is very good. Adam is not a young narrator, but Arshay Cooper is not writing this as a young person: he’s looking back as an adult. But, of course, there’s a lot of street talk because it’s about the kids in high school. Adam Lazarre-White does a brilliant job of balancing that and making it believable, because you have to believe that that dialogue, as it was written, is real. It’s a beautiful audiobook."

"This is a book of essays and poems, collected and edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain . They asked writers to take a five-year period of history and write something about that period, so it could be anything, but it is chronological: it starts in 1619 and goes through to 2019 and contemporary history. There’s a lot of really interesting focus on specific events, on the laws that were passed, on tragic incidents. It’s about the focus a contemporary author brings to that period of history, in a way that we might not think about. There are 90 entries, so most of them are fairly short, less than 10 minutes each. In audio, we have this huge cast. Sometimes there are authors who are reading their own work, like Nikole Hannah-Jones, who also wrote 1619, another history project that has been getting a lot of attention in the US. “The books we choose give the listener something that they might not otherwise get” There is also a cast of some of the very best audiobook narrators. These professional narrators shine with their performance of these often very difficult works and tough subjects. That’s what they’re trained to do, to bring forth the emotional detail and connection that the author has. Authors can write, but sometimes they can’t always narrate a book as well as some of the professional narrators. So you have Robin Miles, Dion Graham, January LaVoy, J.D. Jackson. I think all of them are AudioFile Golden Voice Narrators . When you think of this being a community of history, you have the community that has written the history, but you also have this community of brilliant narrators who are bringing it to listeners in a way that I don’t think you could experience in the same way if you were reading it with your eyes. It’s hard listening, it’s often inspiring listening. It’s very sad, but it’s important listening. It’s powerful. I’m very glad that I listened to it. It is also not something that you have to listen to in one sitting, because it’s chronological. They did a very good job on this audiobook, because collections aren’t always as successful in audio, when they run together, without a pause, or something that breaks it into what you might see with your eyes. In this case, there are oral clues of the date, of the period of time. The five years are always announced before the poem or the essay."

"This is by Daniel James Brown, who is the author of The Boys in the Boat , which was what initially attracted me. It’s read by Louis Ozawa, who is a Japanese American actor and has a cultural connection to this story. It follows four young Japanese American men, starting at Pearl Harbor in 1941. It traces not just the lives of these four young men but goes back into the history of their families and what happens to them through this whole period. First, the men were interned, and they were not allowed to be part of the American army. Then they were allowed to enlist. Three went to Europe where they had brilliant careers as part of an infantry regiment that was very instrumental in the European theater in the war. They were highly decorated. One of them was a conscientious objector. The origin of this book is something called the Densho project, which is an oral history of Japanese Americans. Dan Brown got interested in that and then started doing research on these specific young men. It is a fascinating biography but also a history of the time. Dan Brown writes very approachably and Louis Ozawa is just spectacular. It’s 17 hours so it is long, but because it’s also a biography, you want to know the whole arc of these men’s lives."

"This is something that audio can do so well. At the time that Durrell was writing these four novels between 1957 and 1960, they were all the rage. They came out to great acclaim, and everyone knew them and read them. His work is a little bit obscure now. When you mention Lawrence Durrell to a younger person, it’s not an author they would necessarily read. But here Naxos AudioBooks decided to do a new, unabridged recording of the four novels. They got Nicholas Boulton, a British narrator, who is just brilliant with these novels. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter When we reviewed the first one, Justine , we recognized that Durrell’s descriptive language and the sensual nature of the prose is so vivid and so moving in a way that particularly comes across in audio and in Nicholas Boulton’s performance. So it got an Earphones Award. Then we had the second one reviewed, and a different reviewer gave that book an Earphones Award. All four of them—from four different reviewers all with slightly different takes—were just totally taken by the language and this audio experience of Durrell’s work. They’re set in the 1940s in Alexandria, Egypt, just before and during World War Two . It’s a set of events and characters that are seen from different points of view. It’s the whole idea of being able to see the same thing differently. What’s interesting about the casting here is that Nicholas Boulton became all of those different characters and points of view, instead of having a cast which, maybe, another publisher might have done. He pulls it off brilliantly. Gerald Durrell is one of my absolute favourites. He’s just funnier than anything. In his stories about Corfu, his brother Larry does not come off well at all. I have to say I had a little prejudice about Lawrence Durrell before I saw all the brilliant reviews of the Alexandria Quartet."

"This is a memoir by Kitt Shapiro, the daughter of Eartha Kitt, the great jazz musician and singer. She’s writing about her life with her mother, with whom she spent a lot of time. In her career, Earth Kitt was not allowed in many places in America. She was more welcome abroad, so she performed a lot in Europe—but she didn’t want to leave her daughter behind. So Kitt travelled with Eartha as a child, then as a young person, and eventually became her manager. The memoir doesn’t gloss over the hard times, and hard things that happened in Eartha’s career and in her relationship with Kitt—but it is also extremely loving and warm. It’s a powerful story that really makes you appreciate Eartha and her career and the challenges she faced. It was a very hard time to be a black musician in the world, and yet she achieved such fame. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kitt Shapiro is not reading the memoir herself. Sometimes authors do a really brilliant job with their memoirs, sometimes not. This one is read by Karen Chilton, who has just a beautiful, beautiful voice. It’s very rich, it reminds me a little bit of Eartha Kitt’s very distinctive voice. We have an interview with Karen Chilton, and she has a very interesting connection with this memoir. She met Eartha Kitt once, so she is reading the biography of someone that she had met. She is also the author of two biographies of jazz musicians and narrated Billie Holiday’s biography. So the world of jazz is something that she knows. Her connection with Eartha & Kitt is emotionally very strong and it’s a great listen."

"Peter May writes about a forensic investigator, Enzo Macleod, who sometimes in the series is in Scotland, but in this one has retired to southern France. He’s a workaholic, so he doesn’t enjoy being retired, and gets involved with an old mystery. It goes back to World War II, when this part of France was occupied by the Nazis, so you get elements of the French Resistance as well as stolen art treasures and all kinds of things going on within this mystery. I have to give Peter Forbes, the narrator, just a tremendous amount of credit here. First of all, you’ve got Scottish accents mixed with French and German and all the characters in this. I was really in awe of his ability to not only convincingly put these accents together but keep them all straight. Peter Forbes has recorded many of Peter May’s mysteries, and I would imagine that they’re probably easier when they’re set in Scotland because French with a Scottish accent is quite a feat. So I don’t know what UK listeners will think of it but, to an American, it comes off pretty well. He does. As I said, he’s done a number of Peter May’s titles, which are often a little dark and a little tense. Keeping the listener on edge is part of the plan. Peter Forbes does that extremely well, even though you’re in southern France, so there’s food and all kinds of other diversions, which lighten this episode in the series."

"This is by Maggie O’Farrell, who wrote Hamnet , which was a great success last year. In The Marriage Portrait, she takes us to 16th-century Italy and the Medicis. It’s about a child bride, Lucrezia de’Medici, who is the daughter of Cosimo de’Medici. She marries the Duke of Ferrara at the age of 15. This is a true historical event. The actress Genevieve Gaunt, who narrates the audiobook, has the perfect voice for this story. She’s got a huge range of characters she has to do. She has to be a 15-year-old bride, who has a lot of spirit, but she’s up against a huge force in the Duke of Ferrara, who has a deep baritone. Then you’ve got the courtiers, the princes and her maid. The book is beautifully written, so there are lots of descriptions of the court and the palaces and her garments. Genevieve Gaunt captures not only these portraits, which are very powerful and very diverse, but all the details. She makes you feel like you’re there—you’re seeing a table laid with all these foods, or Lucrezia’s gown. You just see it so beautifully. “It has to be an audio experience that people will remember” There’s a lot going on, and it’s embellished a bit in the romance. There’s plenty of melodrama. It’s also scary because not good things happen. That’s true in the history as well. There is a lot of foreshadowing. It’s just great listening. Interestingly, the book reviews in print have been mixed. Lots of people love it but there have been some fairly negative reviews. When I read those I thought, ‘You just didn’t have Genevieve Gaunt telling you this story!’ She just places you there as a listener in 16th-century Italy. Yes, she does the historical note, which is extensive because of the research that she did. After you’ve finished with the story you can listen to that, although some people prefer to listen to the afterword first. There is a portrait of Lucrezia de’Medici attributed to Bronzino. Browning also wrote a poem, “My Last Duchess” about the Duke of Ferrara with a fictional portrait. The book has wonderful references back and forth. A portrait of Lucrezia is also being created in the story."

"The Maid is set in a boutique hotel in Manhattan. The protagonist is Molly the maid, who tells the story. There is a crime, Molly is blamed and we have to figure out what the truth is. Lauren Ambrose is the narrator. She is an American actress who I don’t think has done a lot of audiobooks, but she really gets the character of Molly. Molly is an excellent maid; she gets everything right every time and is very precise. That’s very important to her because although it’s not specified, Molly is somewhere on the autism spectrum. Everything has to be in its place and that’s how she gets through her work and her life. There is a slight speech pattern that Lauren gives Molly that is so subtle and so beautifully articulated. I have no idea how she invented this voice but it is perfect for reflecting the psychology of the character. You really feel you are listening to someone whose whole life has to be in the details done the same every time and that if anything goes awry then you’re off kilter. It’s just brilliantly done. The Maid is also a very good mystery, with lots of red herrings, lots of misdirection. You’re really rooting for Molly to be exonerated."

"I know Zora Neale Hurston best for her fiction, and particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God , which is probably her best-known work. I have read a couple other of her novels and some short stories. This is the first collection of nonfiction I’ve come across, and it was put together from writings that she did, mostly from Manhattan, in Harlem, during the 1930s, 40s and up into the 50s and they reflect that period of history. She has a very strong, opinionated voice and she’s using it in these various essays. Some essays are longer than others, some are quite short. The latest is from the 1950s, when she attended a famous trial of a Black woman who was accused of murdering a white doctor after years of his abuse of her. Her voice and her opinions really resonate today. What’s interesting in listening to these essays is that Robin Miles—who we may have talked about before as an audiobook narrator, she’s one of our ‘Golden Voices’—is brilliant at capturing the subtleties of accents, tonal changes, certain regionalisms and the speech patterns. These essays weren’t written in the last decade, so the style of the writing is a little different. Robin picks up on all the cadences. The whole stylistic presentation of the essays is fabulous, and also the spirit of the writer, of Zora, comes through so well. Very much so. We believe in what she is saying now, but no one was listening then. That makes you even madder—or at least it makes me madder. With the injustices that we see now, at least there are some people listening, but I can imagine back then they were not being heard in any way. But she was still writing. It makes you wonder where these essays have been all this time, but I’m glad that they’ve been collected now."

"Inside Voice is strictly audio, as far as I know. It’s more like a program that you might hear as an extended podcast or a documentary series. Lake Bell’s interest is in the voice: how we hear our own voice and also how we hear others’ voices. She’s fun to listen to and you can take Inside Voice on a couple of different levels. As a voice actress, she goes over the things that she did to her voice to clean it up, to get rid of regionalisms and speech patterns. Then she comes around to saying this was not a good thing, because we should all have those things that tell people little bits about our culture and our background and where we’re from. If we grew up in Tennessee, then there should be a hint of that in our speaking voice. It’s part of who we are. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She also talks about how every time we hear a voice, we judge it in a certain way. That’s pretty much innate, so how do you resist that or get beyond it? How do you hear a voice and not make a judgement about something that you think because you hear it? Another angle on Inside Voice is that if you think about it as an audiobook listener, every time you listen to an audiobook, you’re hearing and judging a voice. That voice has to connect with the right characters or it does not engage you. I think I loved this program because of that, because you can take it on several levels. Yes. She makes it sort of a game she’s playing. She’s very funny. She’s snarky. She’s smart. The publisher is Pushkin Industries, which is Malcolm Gladwell’s company. Their whole objective is to push the boundaries of audiobook programming with new ideas. It’s very forward-thinking. She makes a comment about breaking away or ‘blooming’ from the origins of a traditional audiobook. She uses clips from voicemail messages and old answering machine messages, she has clips of other actors with very distinctive voices. She uses all of this material and puts it into this complex program that is her Inside Voice audio."

"It is a devastating story. It’s a memoir of her marriage and the death of her husband by assisted suicide. Listening to the audio version embodies why author memoirs are so popular and so powerful as audiobooks. You hear her telling this story. It’s an intensely personal story. She’s a professional in the way that she holds herself together as she tells this story, but as the listener, you hear—she can’t help but have in her voice—the emotion and the many feelings that she had as she went through this incredible experience with her husband. Memoirs can sometimes be fun and funny, but always with an author memoir, that deep emotional piece is in their voice, whether they know it or not, or whether they try to hide it or not. It’s there, and we hear it. The effectiveness of that connection with us is one of the brilliant things about listening to an audiobook memoir. Yes, and how she supports him, despite all the conflicting emotions that she goes through. It was a great marriage. She has a great devotion to him. This was something she wanted to support him in but it’s about how incredibly difficult it was. It’s amazing that she could write this book. And then that she could record it as well. It’s a brilliant piece. Before listening to it, I thought, ‘Do I really want to listen to this?’ but it had excellent reviews. I was entranced by the way she tells the story. She pulls no punches, that honesty in the memoir, and in her voice, was very compelling, as hard as it was—and it was a whole lot harder on her, of course, than it was on us listening to it. It’s amazing. So that’s a sad one, but there are lots of different kinds of choices on our best-of-the-year list. Right. And sometimes it’s hard to discover which audiobooks you might want to listen to. Curating five is a nice start. Also, for each of the 50+ audiobooks on our best-of-the-year list, we have sound clips you can try out . There are also several podcast episodes with the narrators. Coming up, we have Lake Bell talking to us about Inside Voice and Robin Miles talking about You Don’t Know Us Negroes . So you can listen to the audiobook clip or you could listen to a little bit of a conversation with the narrators talking about the books, which is fun. That’s two ways that you can discover what’s interesting in an audiobook before you make your choice."

"As an audiobook, hands down it’s President Obama’s A Promised Land , which has just come out in the last few months. It’s absolutely stunning as a listening experience, and I think his style of writing and presentation suit the format beautifully. As he’s said in interviews he’s done about the memoir, he wants to speak directly to listeners and in particular to young people. I heard him do a presentation for the high school system of Chicago, where he is talking to the students. In his lovely style he says, ‘kids, you’re not really going to enjoy all of it. But there’s a lot of really important stuff that I put in here for you.’ And I think that’s true. There are really wonderful lessons and thoughtful ideas for young people to take hold of. You’re going over many years of history, of a person’s life. With the Obama memoir, at AudioFile we interviewed the producer of the audiobook, Dan Zitt, who is an executive producer at Penguin Random House. He said that if you think of memoir as a genre, it begins with the writer trying to recreate their journey in a way that satisfies their own need for reflection. I thought that was such an interesting thing to say about Obama. It is probably one of the reasons that his memoir is so brilliant, his reflective nature about his presidential terms. It also tells you why the George Bush memoir is a totally different kind of journey. Each of them is taking a journey and they’re wanting to tell you a story about that journey."

"Let’s go on to the Bill Clinton memoir, My Life. I think he has a very good presentational style. I listened primarily to the short one, with President Clinton, who did a narration of six hours. I loved it. You’re really hearing him, his style and his accent, his voice, which I recognize. When I then switched and listened to Michael Beck, who is the narrator of the unabridged version, it really seemed to lack something for me. That’s because I know what Bill Clinton’s voice sounds like. 20 years from now, the people listening probably won’t recall his voice so specifically. When it comes out in a timely way, you appreciate the fact that you’re hearing a president tell the story of his life. It’s very effective that way. But if you are a serious reader of memoirs and history, you don’t want to miss anything that might have been cut out of the full memoir. My Life follows very much the form of mixing personal and political life, which, of course, is completely intertwined for all of them. But I think that intersection of the personal and political in the Clinton memoir was a particularly interesting aspect of it, as he tells it. I think so. Of course, it was carefully prepared, but he was good with his presentation. Whether he wrote it completely himself or not, I don’t really know. With the Obama memoir, they say he did pretty much write all of it himself, which I’m not sure is the case for some of the others. Right, and that’s because Obama has experience with two other audiobooks and he understands the storytelling nature of the audiobook format. You have to tell it like a story. You can’t just read the text well. And I think when you get to George W. Bush’s Decision Points , his style, it’s very clear that he’s reading what he has written. In this case, if I wanted to hear his version of his presidency, I probably would want to listen to Ron McLarty, who reads the unabridged version of Decision Points . Yes, it’s sometimes complicated by what you think about their politics, but also whether you like the sound of their voice. There’s also the archival nature of these memoirs. They are not only recordings of the presidents’ voices, but with their own story. That creates something that is very important history. Yes, but also that they’ve written it as their memoir."

"It’s interesting to see the variety of these memoirs. Much as I’m not a big fan of George W. Bush for his politics, it was an important time in history, and his take on it is important too, and hearing him talk about it. But I think his writing is not as well-suited to narrative. It doesn’t flow in a storytelling style. “You appreciate the fact that you’re hearing a president tell the story of his life” When you talk to authors who are writing fiction , if they read their work aloud to themselves when they’re writing it, it’s probably going to be a better audiobook than if no one has ever read that sentence aloud. One of the things about history —and probably biography as well—is that not all authors, including presidents, think about creating a sentence that is to be read aloud. I think I might be more interested in reading George W. Bush’s memoir in full length with my eyes."

"This is Joe Biden ‘s first memoir, probably there will be others. It’s perhaps not as substantial a memoir as he may write later. He published Promise Me, Dad in 2017 and it’s more or less a memoir about his time as vice president at the time of his son Beau’s death. It’s a moving, personal story delivered with empathy. I think right now people are very interested in Joe Biden. That’s why I put it on the list—if you want to know a little bit more about not just his own personal tragedy and how he felt and his reflections on that, but also about his time in the US Senate and as vice president. It’s also interesting listening to this now and thinking about whether what he said he wanted to do then is something that he can actually implement as president. What is going to happen in the term that’s just starting? Yes. It’s bit like Obama’s Audacity of Hope , or Dreams From My Father . Both of those are shorter. Just like Biden’s book, the scope of time was limited—they’re not about an entire presidency or an entire life. Right. Whatever they’re telling, it seems that it’s probably for a purpose in their political career."

"Yes, for my fifth book, I picked probably one of the most highly regarded memoirs by an American president, which is The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant . Grant was the US president after the Civil War , after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He had two terms as president, but his career before that had been as a general, as commander of the Union Army. After his presidency, he wrote voluminous memoirs, looking back at a lot of the Civil War battles and giving his overview and perspective on the history. He seems to have found a voice in his memoirs, that maybe no one expected. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The audiobook of the memoir is read by a professional narrator, Mark Bramhall. This is again very long, nearly 30 hours. Particularly for this long form, you have to engage your listeners and the narrator needs to be engaged with the material. In order to sustain your listeners, you have to keep a pace. What I really liked about Mark’s narration is that he was able to do that. He does, really well. Possibly years from now we’ll look back at these current memoirs, that were read by a professional narrator. If you’re really interested in the history of the time, having someone who paces your listening experience, who sustains the energy throughout the whole thing, will be a plus. Yes, it’s long. And we see the same thing when it comes to biographies. Yes, it allows us to go a little further back, but also because I think that audiobook biographies are a great category. And there are lots of interesting ones, particularly of several of the American presidents. The Passage of Power is one of four, possibly five, volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (the whole thing is called The Years of Lyndon Johnson) . Each of them is around 30 hours long and they’re all narrated by Grover Gardner, over a period of almost 20 years. He’s in the head of Robert Caro and is totally connected to that writing. He is an AudioFile Golden Voice Narrator and has a long career of nonfiction biography. He just knows how to make the pace for these very long, longform works to keep the listeners with him, with enough energy but not putting so much energy in that it’s exhausting for you as a listener. “You have to tell it like a story. You can’t just read the text well” Also, keeping the details straight. In all of these books there’s a lot of historical and political detail. If you’re reading with your eyes, if there’s a long section about legislation that you might not be interested in, you can just skip ahead a bit. You can’t do that easily in an audiobook—so that puts a burden on the narrator to get you through the long and perhaps less exciting parts of an audiobook memoir or biography. Once you get to biographies, you also get the perspective of time. Memoirs are written when that person is alive, so there’s not as much opportunity for that. In this book you get Robert Caro’s perspective as a biographer and historian and possibly see the person and the presidency in a slightly different light. Lyndon B Johnson was a master of how to get really important legislation through the US Senate. Harry Truman was a president that probably didn’t enjoy as much of a positive reputation for his presidency at the time, but the way McCullough was able to profile him brought him into a context that made his presidency better understood. Yes, because we don’t have memoirs, we have biographies. There is also an interesting biography of Ulysses S Grant called Grant by Ron Chernow. That’s read by the same narrator who did the memoirs, Mark Bramhall."

"He is. He enjoys writing. Maybe doing these memoirs of different parts of his life was more interesting to him than doing a definitive, long one starting with, ‘I was born in Georgia.’ He’s still recording programs in his 90s. His last book was faith-based, as I recall. I didn’t mention it, because it wasn’t about his life as president. White House Diary is interesting. It’s a focused part of the time that he was in the White House. It’s shorter than some of the other books we’ve been discussing, it’s not an exhaustive look at his presidency. I think that’s true. He came to the presidency without a lot of political background, and that’s really hard. The humanitarian work he did in the years after the presidency is perhaps more significant in a way—like his involvement with Habitat for Humanity and other things that he has done."