Straight from the Horse’s Mouth: Audiobook Memoirs Read by the Author

I unabashedly love audiobooks. They are not cheating. Audiobooks are simply a different way to take in and make sense of information, and to enjoy stories.

Audiobooks have an inherent performance value that can be done well with multi-person cast productions or simply great individual narrators. My personal favorite is the particular insight and authenticity conveyed by a memoir or biography narrated by its writer. The emotion, the timing, and understanding of a particular instance, recounted by the voice of the person who went through it, can’t be easily recreated.

Here are twelve relatively recent memoirs read by the author that I devoured for the Seattle Public Library’s 2017 Summer Book Bingo, and a few more that I plan to listen to soon:

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir by Ron Perlman
• Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir by Carrie Brownstein
• Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
• Leonard: My Fifty-year Friendship with a Remarkable Man by William Shatner
• Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari

• Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming
• Paddle your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman
• The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
• The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
• Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling
• You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie

~posted by Mychal L.