My ten most enjoyed audiobook listening experiences, in no order, in 2022.
August marked the first full year I took to running as a hobby and routine. Between January and December of this year, I covered over 1,000km in distance, gained over 3.5 km in elevation, and hit the road on 204 days. In that time, I’ve come to appreciate terrains, cities, towns and nature for their beauty, quietness, dampness, solitude and ephemerality. I’ve discovered that to run is to be in solitude and not solitary, to be in aloneness and not loneliness, and to be in reflections and not refractions. Running brings joy, clarity of thoughts, self-reflections, solitude, quietness, peace, and tranquillity.
Running allowed me to engage in many of my hobbies that I stopped enjoying due to lack of time and because, in life, everything seems to be on the fast lane. Through my routine of early morning running, I have enjoyed listening to podcasts and audiobooks. On the occasional odd times that my earpiece battery ran out, the sounds of my running shoes hitting the road tars and bricks.
Nowadays, whenever I’m in a city, town, or village, I look at the environment and ask myself if this environment would be a haven or sanctuary for a runner. In every city I have visited and stayed overnight in the UK, I have tried to experience the city’s friendliness or otherwise to the runner. I ran in Leicester, Manchester, Ipswich, Bristol, Cardiff, Barry town, and of course, my home city – Hull. I have enjoyed running in all these places because they offer uniqueness in their terrains, soundscapes, landscapes, and smell.
Running along the canal side in Leicester was a thing of joy and beauty. Running along the main roads in Bristol was an opportunity to reflect on the busyness of life and the need to slow down amid everything – knowns and unknowns. Running in Manchester was an opportunity to smell the city and see some of the historic manufacturing reflections of the city. In Roath, Cardiff, running was an opportunity to see the development of a satellite town that evolved from a major city – the industrial routes of the running gave me a sense of the city’s productivity. At Ipswich, running there was unique and special. The terrain in Ipswich was pleasant, and the environment was eerily countryside.
I run whenever I’m in Barry town in Wales, a dock town like Hull, but the terrains from the two places cannot be more contrasting. One is a flat plain, and the other is hilly. One is a place of joy for leisure running, and the other is for endurance running. One running route is along the neighbourhood roads, and the other is between the main roads and fenced train tracks. One offered the sights and sounds of sleepy homes early in the morning. The other offers the sights and sounds of passing cars, trucks, cyclists and the odd runners along the industrial estate, the dockside. One offers a monologue of an experience – flat plain, fixed with similar buildings and parked cars on the streets’ side roads. The other offers a cosmopolitan dialogical experience: the industrial estate to the left, the downward slope at the beginning, the flat plain in the middle, the upwards slope, later, the downward slope again, the town centre, the fire station, the colourful bridge.
Running took me through pleasurable audio listening experiences – podcasts and audiobooks – the good, the bad, and the not-so-good. So, why the bad or not-so-good categories? I usually stop listening to any podcast or audiobook in the bad and not-so-good categories. On many occasions, I had to stop listening to them out of respect for my time. It is out of this respect that I usually avoid writing any reviews about podcasts and audiobooks in these two categories. It may reflect my impatience or lack of the luxury of time.
I listened to memoirs by a poet, an ex-president, and the daughter of an executed environmental activist. I listened to audiobooks from far and near, from individuals with diverse backgrounds and statuses but with a common interest – to tell their stories. Sometimes I’m left wondering what was happening in the storyteller’s life during some of the events mentioned. There were the occasional near misses, life-defining events and, at times, globally impacting scenes. I listened to different narrator voices and accents. The more I got into the differences in their voices and accents, the more I enjoyed the experience. The more authentic every word they spoke sounded to me – perhaps this is a saving grace from the monotonous voice I get on most radio stations.
A lovely experience from all the excellent audio listening this year was the narrators’ ability to bring their stories and books to life. This experience connected with me as a listener, giving me a visual experience of their readings without being overly descriptive or verbose. There are days I listened to podcasts, mainly, How I built this by Guy Raz. Still, on most days, I listened to audiobooks.
The list:
- Black Boy
Author: Richard Wright
Narrator: Peter Francis James
Duration: 151/2 hours
Publisher: Random House
This is an exploration of self-education and determination fuelled by the desire to escape oppression, marginalisation, silence, and self-doubts. It is about race and slavery history in America’s history. It’s about the internal struggles to belong and to be absent at the same time.
“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.”
It’s about the challenges of comradeship and the suspicions that come from not towing the group’s line. It’s about struggles with faith and family, train journey, otherness, earning a living, and the desire to be a contrarian without planning to be one.
“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books… I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
It’s about the love of books and reading; it’s about the desire to write and write and right – the wrongs – through writing. Some of the desires in Wright reflect in Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle.
- Looking for Trans wonderland: Travels in Nigeria
Author: Noo Saro-Wiwa
Narrator: Adjoa Andoh
Duration: 11 hours
Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
If this was meant to be a redemption or reconciliatory journey between Noo and her beloved home away from home, it probably left more questions to be answered. Noo lost her father – Ken Saro-Wiwa – whom the Nigerian government executed in the 1990s during the military junta. Listening to the audiobook made me wonder what could have been going on in Noo’s mind while preparing to go on the journey and travel across the north and south of the country – from the cosmopolitan Lagos to the mountains of Obudu and the Yankari game reserve in Bauchi.
“Whatever happens, bane is the one place on earth that feels like mind, whether I want to stay here or not. I need no title deeds to this place; and found comfort in the thought that my genes alone grant me an undisputed claim to the land.”
The more I listened to Noo’s stories, the more I wondered about the love-hate relationship she seemed to have with the Nigerian state. Talking and reflecting about childhood trips across the country with her father and embarking on the same journey alone as an adult must have been surreal for her, especially under the circumstances in which the Nigerian state executed her father.
I remember the day it was announced that the government had executed Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogoni Land environmental activists. That event shook the world; made the then South African president – Nelson Mandela – go to a highly unusual character to openly call out the then Nigerian head of state – General Sani Abacha. The diplomatic row eventually meandered its way into sports as Nigeria decided not to attend the African Nations Cup held in South Africa in 1996.
- Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Author: Robert Macfarlane
Narrator: Roy McMillan
Duration: 13 hours
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd.
Underland took me into caves, places, and events about nature that I found fascinating and scary. This is a book about the love of the outdoors and nature. It’s about the drive, passion, desire and hopes to preserve what is left of the natural world. It’s not a manifesto, but it reminds everyone that preserving the natural world is an existential challenge.
“The real underland of language is not the roots of single words, but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world-makers – and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.”
I have always wondered why many educators in the UK are fascinated by Macfarlane’s Lost Worlds but listening to Underland answered my quiet questions about the author’s work. His writing is poetic.
- The Beautiful Struggle
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Narrator: Hayden McLean
Duration: 31/2 hours
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd.
Was it a beautiful struggle? From dropping out of college to becoming a young father to having a father walk out on his family to a childhood blighted by daily threats from people that looked like you and those that didn’t look like you? Coates experienced it all in his childhood and was constantly staring at the abyss of failure in the face, but he stuck to two important things in life – reading and writing.
“On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.”
He longed for his father’s attention but had it missing; he wrote and wrote until he was fortunate enough to write himself into financial “comfort” to take to writing as a full occupation in adulthood. He wrote about his loss of faith, just like Richard Wright in Black Boy.
- My Name Is Why
Author: Lemn Sissay
Narrators: Lemn Sissay, Richard Burnip, Zoe Mills
Duration: 7 hours
Publisher: Canongate Books
What a gentle, subtle, and kind-hearted soul Lemn seems to be. My Name is Why is about identity, acceptance, and the longing for home. It’s about longing for family and friendships, and belongings.
“A fourteen-year-old boy should never have to ask the questions Who is my mother? and Who are my family? These were not easy questions to formulate in the mind or the mouth because the question comes with others . . . What did I do to deserve this?”
It’s about the injustices experienced in the hands of those meant to provide sanctuary and hopes and aspirations to a child but did otherwise. It’s about deprivations and lack of understanding from the state against a child who just needed familial love every soul long for.
“Look what was sown by the stars
At night across the fields
I am not defined by scars
But by the incredible ability to heal”
When the world seemed to be against Lemn, he turned to poetry, which provided him with the much-longed-for sanctuary, but poetry could not fill the void of the missing identity of his mother. He longed for that and decided to use poetry as an outlet to reach out to the world in the voice of a young man seeking a home through poetry. He wrote about Lancashire; he wrote about his beloved Ethiopia. Home, after all, is where the heart is, they say.
- Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Narrator: Malcolm Gladwell
Duration: 82/3 hours
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd.
If you are already paranoid about strangers, then this is not necessarily a book for you because it’ll most likely reinforce your paranoia for others. In his usual way, Gladwell carved out intriguing stories that, at times, are borderlines graphics in their details and verge on the edge of cognitively bruising to the human soul.
“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.”
It’s about real human case studies of events about the strangers we all think we knew but did not know. From military espionage to rape and abuse cases, Gladwell took us through how humans can be who we think they are and whom we think they are not.
- Between the World and Me
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Narrator: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Duration: 31/2 hours
Publisher: Books on Tape
This is the second Coates book I’m picking for the year. He has the privilege of appearing on my best listening list for the year for the second time; perhaps it reflects how much I enjoy his writing.
“My work is to give you what I know of my particular path while allowing you to walk your own.”
Coates explored issues of slavery, racism, politics, the role of the writer, and dissonance in Between the World and Me. Coates talked about becoming the Black voice on racism in the mainstream print media even though he never aspired to that – he just wanted to use his writings to voice out the cries of the marginalised, oppressed and denied.
“So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”
Coates wrote to talk about how housing policies were rigged against the marginalised and oppressed – particularly, the Black communities; he wrote about gentrification; he wrote about writing to communicate his feelings on issues that are most important to him. Truly, it was Between the World and Coates.
- Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy
Author: Serhii Plokhy
Narrator: Leighton Pugh
Duration: 13 hours
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd.
For a brief insight into the war between Ukraine and Russia, give this book a listen or read it—whichever way fascinates you. Chernobyl (pronounced Chornobyl in Ukraine) was a daring nuclear programme by the then-Soviet Union. The programme took years to complete, and a great deal of national pride was attached to it. From the very beginning, the programme emphasised the importance of timing. When the disaster occurred in Unit 4, this emphasis on time intensified, with each passing second becoming crucial.
“The world has already been overwhelmed by one Chernobyl and one exclusion zone. It cannot afford any more. It must learn its lessons from what happened in and around Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.”
The Chernobyl disaster destroyed homes, families and communities and even affected nations. The Chernobyl disaster involved blame trading and denials; it highlighted how adversity to one is adversity to all.
“Altogether, 50 million curies of radiation were released by the Chernobyl explosion, the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs. All that was required for such catastrophic fallout was the escape of less than 5 percent of the reactor’s nuclear fuel. Originally it had contained more than 250 pounds of enriched uranium—enough to pollute and devastate most of Europe. And if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would have remained on the planet.”
Individuals, families, communities, nations, continents, and humanity fretted about the looming dangers of the disaster. The story of Chernobyl was about love, communities, hopes, pride, aspirations, and success turning into nightmares overnight and remaining until today.
- The Jersey- The All Blacks: The Secrets Behind the World’s Most Successful Team
Author: Peter Bills
Narrator: Mike Sengelow
Duration: 14 hours
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
I’ve always been fascinated by the Haka, usually performed by the New Zealand All Blacks and their iconic black jersey.
“Nothing great has ever been accomplished without passion.”
I know little or nothing about Rugby as a sport. Still, the New Zealand All Blacks have become an iconic sporting icon, just like the Boys from Brazil in football, the LA Lakers and Chicago Bulls in basketball, or Muhammad Ali in boxing. So, when I got the opportunity to go into the world of the All Blacks, I took the opportunity, and it was a fantastic listen.
“Getting them to understand who they really are, rather than who they think they should be.”
Jersey is about a sports team becoming a national identity; it’s about the hopes and aspirations of the child, individual, families, communities, and nation. It’s about a culture of high expectations and aspirations; it’s about sporting success tainted with personal responsibilities and dignity even in despair, desperation, and a staring abyss of failure.
- A Promised Land
Author: Barack Obama
Narrator: Barack Obama
Duration: 29 hours
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd.
Listening to A Promised Land was pleasurable. The writing style, the narration, and the insights it provides on geopolitics, community issues, race matters, economic problems, leadership styles, and consensus-reaching are fascinating. It’s enough that the book is over eight hundred pages, and part two is still to come but to narrate it for almost thirty hours by the author is astonishing.
“over time I’ve trained myself to take the long view, about how important it is to stay focused on your goals rather than getting hung up on the daily ups and downs.”
I’ve always seen President Obama as an enigma, someone whose personality and politics, particularly his foreign politics, always leave questions to be answered about the man and his politics.
“maybe politics could be less about power and positioning and more about community and connection.”
I chose to listen to A Promised Land because I wanted to gain some insights into community engagement, leadership style, and perhaps the human behind the personae. I found parts of the book surreal, like when the Black Butler in the White House first met Obama – the brief conversation meant so much to the two of them; perhaps, more to the Butler. Or the thin line between failure of going into the political abyss and the success of winning the senate seat and suddenly becoming an overnight national icon.
The power of description is something that the President did very well; he reads and writes, and most importantly, he talks eloquently.
“The day was cold, the wind cutting, the sun a dim watermark on the gray sky.”
The book took the reader/listener into some of the inner struggles of Obama as a family man and leader. The need to make decisions that could have impacts not just at the local or national level but on a global scale. The President’s descriptions of the personalities of some of the world leaders are interesting and, at times, amusing.
