One of my favorite January reading traditions is to focus on short books. Some folks like to start the new year with a massive tome, and while I understand the appeal of that, I’ve always enjoyed reading a slew of short books in January. It’s a nice way to get energized about a new year of reading. This month, I’m highlighting three audiobooks, all with a runtime under three hours, that, while short, are incredibly impactful. These audiobooks might only take you a few hours to finish, but I guarantee you’ll be thinking about them for many hours beyond.
In her newest book, THE SERVICEBERRY, Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer offers a thoughtful, hopeful, and creative primer on gift economies, and the ways we can weave them into our lives, even alongside and within the destructive capitalist economy we currently live in. If you’ve never had the pleasure of listening to Kimmerer read her own work, this short audiobook is a perfect place to start. Her voice is warm, inviting, familiar, and full of wonder. You can hear how much she loves plants—and how well she understands them—in every word. She writes about little free libraries and little free farmstands, about what it means to be a good neighbor or part of a community, about how berries and birds generate abundance not through hoarding but through sharing resources within their web of relationships. Throughout the essay, she seamlessly weaves together the many kinds of knowledge she holds—Indigenous and cultural, personal and familial, historical and linguistic, botanical and scientific. This depth of curiosity and wisdom is apparent in her voice, too. Sometimes she laughs; sometimes you can hear her smiling. Sometimes her tone is tinged with sadness or awe.
Like Kimmerer, novelist Isabella Hammad delivers this short audiobook, RECOGNIZING THE STRANGER, with passion, clarity, and deep feeling. Originally delivered as the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University in September 2023, this audiobook is a must-listen for readers looking for a thought-provoking challenge. Hammad explores narrative—both fictional and historical—and offers a critical analysis of how it relates to the Palestinian struggle. She illuminates surprising connections between how fictional narratives function and how we understand history and resistance movements. Hammad dissects “aha” moments in both fiction and life, when a person recognizes themself in the other, and argues that without meaningful action, these moments are merely empty gestures. Her narration is confident and direct; she speaks with obvious passion, but allows her compelling ideas, rather than her delivery of them, to take center stage.
James Baldwin’s play THE AMEN CORNER, first published in 1954, has just been released on audio with a full cast, including Dion Graham, who reads Baldwin’s author’s note and the stage directions, and Myra Lucretia Taylor, who plays the main character, Sister Margaret. The play is set in a small religious community in Harlem and focuses on Sister Margaret, who has devoted her life to religion in an attempt to keep her family safe in a world that kills Black people simply for existing. When her husband, a jazz trombonist, returns after being away for many years, she starts to question all the choices she’s made. This is not an easy listen. It’s a poignant and, at times, despairing drama about the impossible choices Black people in America are too often faced with. As in all of Baldwin’s work, the characterization is layered and nuanced. Myra Lucretia Taylor is brilliant as Sister Margaret; she captures her religious frenzy, anger, hopelessness, determination, and love. The rest of the cast brings the tight-knit, in-each-other's-business-all-the-time community to life. Because the play is centered on a church, there is also a lot of singing, praying, and preaching, all of which makes for an incredibly immersive listening experience. This is a fantastic new production of an important work from Baldwin’s oeuvre.
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