Required listening list: Audiobook Appreciation Month
Besides celebrating Pride Month, June also celebrates audiobooks all month long. June was baptized Audiobook Appreciation Month with the goal of increasing awareness and engagement with the format. Audiobooks might not be the “traditional” way of reading, but if you were to tell me you listen to audiobooks, I would consider you a reader all the same. Audiobooks help make reading more accessible. They help people with impaired vision, attention span issues, or literacy issues. They’re also a great tool for those who need help to get acclimated to a new language. Audiobooks set me on the path to bilingualism. They fed my love for literature and introduced me to the new world of American Lit.
Even after becoming fluent in English, I have continued listening to audiobooks. I’ve found that while some stories are meant to be read, some are meant to be listened. The level of production some audiobooks get today—with multiple narrators to represent different points of view, music, and even sound effects—makes many stories a delightful experience.
To pay tribute to Audiobook Appreciation Month, I’m sharing my required listening list of audiobooks.
The Rule of the Bone
CW: Sexual assault, teen homelessness, drug and gun violence.
Russell Banks’s modern classic redefines the young antihero archetype. The story expertly narrated by Kirby Heyborne, introduces us to Chappie, a punk teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park who has slipped into drugs and petty crime. In anti-heroic fashion, Chappie carves a new identity for himself by getting a crossed-bones tattoo and taking a new name: The Bone.
Looking for a way out of his abusive household, The Bone runs away and finds dangerous refuge with a gang of bikers and thieves. But this gang of hardened criminals proves to be just a pit stop in the Bone’s journey.
After abandoning the biker gang and navigating the world and its hardships, the Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian who takes him in an adventure that spans from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica. The Bone descends in an amazing journey back to redemption through a world of magic, violence, and betrayal.
The Fountainhead
Written by Ayn Rand and narrated by the smooth voice of Christopher Hurt The Fountainhead is a modern classic that takes the reader through a philosophical journey for individualism.
Howard Roark is a gifted architect who navigates in his own terms through a society that praises conformity above creativity. His genius and ability to create for the pure delight of his own work and on no other terms makes him a target and earns him the resentment of those around him. Rand’s provocative novel presents the one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction: man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
Ender’s Game
Ender’s Game is one of the most elaborate productions for an audiobook that I’ve come across. With music and the talented voices of Stefan Rudnicki, Harlan Ellison, and Gabrielle de Cuir, this audiobook is one of the most immersive stories I’ve ever listened to.
Winner of the 1985 Nebula Award and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is a modern classic among the Sci-Fi genre. The book follows the story of a brilliant boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives a normal life in a distant future where governments breed and train child geniuses as soldiers in order to develop a defense against a hostile alien race.
After being drafted for the orbiting Battle School, Ender’s skills earn him respect and high scores in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. But Battle School also comes with its challenges that leave Ender grappling with loneliness, rivalry from his peers, and paralyzing fear of the alien invaders. Can Ender truly become the general Earth needs?
The Infinite Noise
What if X-Men, instead of becoming superheroes, decided to spend some time in therapy? Lauren Shippen’s popular and award-winning podcast The Bright Sessions answers this question and gifted us a book based on the podcast series.
Briggon Snow brings 16-year-old Caleb Michaels to life. He’s got the looks, he’s got the popularity of being the running back for the football team, but he’s also got a secret. Caleb is an Atypical, an individual with enhanced abilities. Caleb’s powers are not like what you’d seen in your regular comic books, Caleb’s ability is extreme empathy: he feels the emotions of everyone around him. Being a teenage empath in high school is hard enough, but Caleb’s ability gets harder to control when gets pulled into the emotional orbit of one of his classmates, Adam—voiced by James Fouhey.
Adam’s feelings are all-consuming and a heavy weight on an already struggling Caleb, but there’s something about Adam’s feelings that Caleb can’t quite understand. There’s a connection between them that Caleb cannot help but want to explore. Caleb's therapist, Dr. Bright, encourages Caleb to explore this connection by befriending Adam. As he and Adam grow closer, Caleb learns more about his ability, himself, his therapist - who seems to know a lot more than she lets on - and just how dangerous being an Atypical can be.
There are so many other great audiobooks out there that deserve to be explored. The format is often snubbed by some hard-core readers who might not consider audiobooks really books, but I’m all for listening to a story once in a while. Audiobooks made literature in English more accessible for me and helped me overcome the challenges that come with being a dyslexic reader, so the format will always hold a special place in my heart.