7 Audiobooks I Have Listened To Recently (Ranked!)

It has been AGES and that wasn’t my intention. Life has been busy and tiring of late, with a real mix of good and not-so-good things. Accompanying me through it all have – of course – been audiobooks. This is a wander through seven audiobooks that I have listened to this year and not written about… And, why not, I’ve ranked them from worst to best.

7. My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy

It’s lowest on my list of seven, but I still enjoyed it. This is a novel about a young woman living in Paris while researching Gertrude Stein, and the friendships and other relationships that develop over that time – with an enormous amount of sidetracking into Stein’s life. My main qualm with it is that it feels like Levy thought about writing a biography of Stein and thought this might be easier to achieve.

6. The Seven-Year Slip by Ashley Poston

My sweet spot of ‘books set in this world but with a fantastic twist’. Clementine works in a very fanciful version of publishing PR and inherits an apartment from her much-loved aunt. She discovers that her aunt’s story is true: the apartment can suddenly travel sevens years back (or forward) in time. That’s how she meets Iwan (pronounced very bizarrely by the narrator) and falls in insta-love with him. It’s a fun idea for a novel, but I would rather have read it outside the romance genre.

5. Lost Boys by James Bloodworth

This is described as a ‘personal journey into the manosphere’, and Bloodworth starts by saying that he has previously been part of these cultish worlds – but it quickly transpires that his participation amounts to little more than an awkward experience at ‘pick-up’ training a very long time ago. I would have found an actual personal experience more interesting (albeit probably more harrowing too), whereas Bloodworth really just writes what any of us with an internet connection might have gathered ourselves.

4. The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Orelan uses the burning down of the Los Angeles Central Library as a starting point to explore the history of libraries – as well as the specifics of the eccentric man who is the main arson suspect. A fascinating and thoroughly researched book, but one which should probably have been cut by about a third.

3. Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

More fantastic literature! In this case, a man is slowly transforming into a shark. It’s not quite set in the real world, because this is a world where metamorphoses are uncommon but known about. Habeck uses this jumping off point for a really poignant depiction of a relationship facing an inescapable obstacle. Get past a few very overwritten pages and you’re in for a treat.

2. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Whatever genius managed to get some of the leading writers of the day to write novels responding to Shakespeare plays, kudos to you. The series has recently leapt back into life – this is only the second I’ve read, and it is brilliant. Hag-Seed is about an ageing theatre director putting on productions of The Tempest in a prison, but is simultaneously a re-telling of The Tempest. Some of the ending is a bit rushed, but I thought it an exceptionally involving, witty, bold and triumphant character study,

1. Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley

A brilliant memoir – coincidentally, also from the perspective of someone working in publishing PR – of a period in which Sloane Crosley’s home is burgled and her dear friend and boss kills himself. She weaves the two together expertly, while also recognising and foregrounding the ways in which they are not comparable – grief is, after all, for people. It is a complex, moving, and unusual exploration of grief and of a friend, and of the limits of knowing anybody else.