A whole bunch of audiobooks I’ve listened to recently

As per, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of audiobooks recently – some very good, some enjoyable trash, some in between. Here’s a quick overview of some of them (…minus the trash, which nobody needs to know more about):

The First Stone (1995) by Helen Garner
After loving This House of Grief, I downloaded an earlier non-fiction by Garner – a response to two college students going to the police after being allegedly groped by the college dean. Garner poses some interesting questions about gradations of assault, and writes excellently as ever, but it is very galling to read a book by a noted feminist where Garner seems nonplussed about why a woman would complain about being groped. She recognises it’s annoying – but not in the same league as rape, and that her generation always just put up with it. I suppose it’s a good sign that, 30 years since this was published, things have moved on sufficiently that no feminist would wonder-out-loud why a woman doesn’t just cope with being assaulted.

Toxic (2023) by Sarah Ditum
Great segue into this excellent collection of essays about what Ditum calls ‘the upskirt decade’ – the 2000s, where the paparazzi were even worse than normal, and famous young women were treated as sexual consumption for everyone. There are chapters on Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Kim Kardashian and more. Sometimes the links she tries to make with contemporary political issues are a bit flimsy, but in general it’s an exceptionally good look at a recent period where media ethics (and common consensus) were so misogynistic. The afterword, sadly, shows how misogyny has largely just found a new guise…

Ride the Pink Horse (1946) by Dorothy B. Hughes
People adore Hughes’s The Expendable Man, but now – having read that and Ride the Pink Horse – I think her brand of hard-boiled Americana isn’t quite for me. In this novel, Sailor comes to town during fiesta trying to exhort money from a man whose wife he was ordered to kill. Along the way, he gets to know various desperate locals. It reminded me of a less miserable Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock – but I still didn’t find much momentum beyond the atmosphere.

You Are Not Alone (2023) by Cariad Lloyd
I love Cariad Lloyd’s podcast Griefcast, interviewing people (usually comedians) about the people they love who’ve died, and how they cope with the grief. This book is closely related – drawing on Lloyd’s grief about her father dying from cancer when she was a teenager. Unsurprisingly, she writes excellently and wisely about grief, and I think this book would be helpful to a griever – perhaps particularly someone who doesn’t know why they haven’t ‘got over it’. Audiobook includes snippets from a fair few podcast episodes.

What’s That Lady Doing? (2023) by Lou Sanders
Lou Sanders is one of those comedians who makes every single sentence funny, and I really enjoyed her memoir. She clearly went through quite a lot as a teenager, and tells stories that balance humour and pathos. I’d have liked even more about her career, but perhaps there is a second book coming.

Broken Horses (2021) by Brandi Carlile
Brandi Carlile is a singer I deeply love, and her audiobook was a real journey. She doesn’t always come across as the easiest person to know, but she’s certainly transparent. The way she delves into songwriting is fascinating and the audiobook includes new versions of many songs at the end of chapters – a perfect reason to choose the audiobook.

Tales from the Café (2017) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I’d heard a lot about this book about a café where you can be transported back in time. What I didn’t realise until I was quite a long way through this audiobook was that (a) it’s an episodic selection of four separate stories, and (b) this is a sequel, not the original. Oops! I enjoyed it, though there is so much world-building and so many rules that the actual emotional moments get a bit lost.

Middle England (2018) by Jonathan Coe
Read for my book club – I really enjoyed my first Coe, often called his Brexit novel (though Brexit takes a long time to appear). There is a broad cast of characters doing ordinary and not-so-ordinary things – ranging from the amusing (an arrogant author on a cruise) to the moving (a man losing his faculties doesn’t understand where his factory workplace has gone). I found a woman dealing with accusations of workplace bigotry particularly interesting and even-handed, and at its best I was really engaged. But it’s also (oops again) the third of a trilogy, and I haven’t read the others – so some of the characters meant very little to me, as they get bit parts that seem to rely on previous time spent with them. Coe is also not subtle in his anti-Brexit stance. (I share his political views, but would like a novelist to be a bit less polemical.)