What does it mean to pay attention? These days, it sometimes feels like paying close attention to anything or anyone is almost impossible. It’s hard to escape the endless news cycle, the pull of social media, and the emails piling up to sit with a book or a place or a person long enough to really see them. I’ve found myself craving listens that invite me to linger with characters and ideas, audiobooks that take their time, that require me to slow down. This month I’m highlighting three audiobooks that do just this. They all explore how the act of paying close attention is an act of love. From a poetry-loving clone fighting a war in the distant future to an unnamed poet in a hospital bed to a scholar who treats her subject with thoughtful curiosity, the characters in and authors of these audiobooks look closely at one thing and find the whole world.
Translator Anton Hur’s debut novel TOWARD ETERNITY is a beautiful, haunting story about love, poetry, AI, and change. Set in the near and very distant future, it unfolds in several distinct sections, each told from a different point of view. Four narrators—David Lee Huynh, Nicky Endres, Zoleka Vundla, and Katherine Littrell—masterfully bring these different characters to life. In the near future, Yonghun, a South African researcher, undergoes an experimental cancer treatment in which his cells are replaced by nanites. Around the same time, he trains an AI, Panit, on poetry. Over hundreds of years, Yonghun and Panit, and the technologies that make their lives possible, drastically change both humans and the earth. All four narrators give wonderfully unique performances, voicing clones, scientists, musicians, and soldiers, both human and android. Though the novel’s scope is expansive, each section focuses on the intimate details of the lives of the characters—the specificities that make them who they are.
Garth Greenwell’s third novel, SMALL RAIN, which he narrates with the urgent yet unforced cadences of a poet, follows an unnamed narrator during an eventful hospital stay at an Iowa City hospital in the fall of 2020. The poet ends up in the ICU after experiencing an unusual and potentially life-threatening medical event. Greenwell describes, with incredible, sometimes excruciating detail, the daily medical humiliations the unnamed poet suffers in the hospital. He also describes, with the same incredible detail, the love between the poet and his partner L, and the moments of tenderness they share during L’s visits. Everything in the poet’s life—the art he loves, the home he and L renovated together, his pain, his body, his fears, his childhood home, the trees in his yard—receives the same careful, sustained, deliberate attention. Greenwell’s narration only adds to the intensity of this attention. His voice is lilting and sure, unadorned, undramatic. He reads as if the book is an epic poem, giving weight to every word, using the momentum of his prose to draw listeners into a deeply interior world.
SURVIVAL IS A PROMISE: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde is not merely a biography of Audre Lorde. With depth, abiding love, intimacy, and rigorous archival research, poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs explores the ongoing legacy of the iconic poet, lesbian feminist, and activist. She narrates this chunky book with reverence. Her soft, musical voice overflows with wonder; sometimes it sounds like she’s smiling through the words, the memory of Lorde’s laugh reverberating through her as she speaks. She doesn’t obscure the impact Lorde has had on her life; instead, she makes the connections between them visible, openly writing into the Black feminist tradition of which they are both a part. She offers close readings of much of Lorde’s poetry, delves into her complicated relationships with other women, and examines Lorde's politics through myriad lenses, from earthquakes to whale songs. Her radical scholarship is proof that paying close attention is an act of love, and this book is a must-listen work of Black and lesbian history.
--
AudioFile Magazine is your #1 source for audiobook reviews.
