(Macfarlane narrates the introduction and Morris makes an appearance in a Q. At the heart of this audiobook is about four hours’ worth of sound collages built from those recordings. A follow-up to “The Lost Words” and “The Lost Spells,” nature-centric children’s books written by Macfarlane and illustrated by Morris, “The Lost Sounds” is mostly the work of Watson, a sound recordist of wildlife around the U.K. One surefire route to True Fun, according to Price, is the great outdoors and THE LOST SOUNDS (Penguin Audio, 4 hours, 40 minutes), by Chris Watson, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, might be the next best thing. Listeners are encouraged to run a (hilariously named) “fun audit” to better understand what makes them feel alive and to keep a “fun times journal.” When possible, we’re told to keep an eye out for “microdoses of fun” and surround ourselves with “fun magnets.” If I found myself rolling my eyes at each new term, or at Price’s occasional presumption that her audience is all white, American and middle-class, I did take the core of her observations to heart: “A lot of what we do ‘for fun’ isn’t fun at all.” Along with a new vocabulary comes a guide to tapping into True Fun. I’m glad I listened to the end, triggers and all.īut this is more than a rehashing of Price’s advice to unplug. But in between the harsh dose of dystopian reality and nonstop grief, there is poetry, as well as maybe a little catharsis. Two hours in, I thought maybe it was time to stop listening. About an hour in, I stopped taking walks with this audiobook because I didn’t want to cry in public.
As the “Arctic plague” spreads around the world, we are given glimpses into a dark reality where human connection and memory are all that is left (“a perpetual funeral in our heart and mind,” as one theme park employee who has to euthanize sick children describes it). It begins with two deaths centuries apart (an early human ancestor revealed by melting Siberian permafrost a researcher who died on the job) and the casualties only increase from there.
#Self improvement audio book full
A full cast (including Julia Whelan, Brian Nishii and Kotaro Watanabe) reads the individual chapters that function as stand-alone, albeit interconnected short stories, set in the terrifyingly real world of an out-of-control pandemic and a rapidly warming climate.Īn escape from your Twitter feed this is not the tragedy in this audiobook is relentless. It’s a lot easier to grasp a speculative universe when that universe is broken into morsels, as it is in Sequoia Nagamatsu’s HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK (HarperAudio, 9 hours, 20 minutes). There is something about all the interlocked plotlines and the phone book glossaries of characters that I have found hard to parse without the benefit of words on a page. Can I close my eyes and listen for 30 minutes of a story without drifting into a nap? Can I find audiobooks that offer not just passive entertainment or fleeting lessons, but concrete self-improvement? Can I explore the fringes of the audiobook landscape until I find something that makes me rethink what an audiobook even is?įor exercises in focus, I have begun to turn to science fiction and epic fantasy - two genres I love, but have long avoided in audio form. But in between those meandering sessions, I’ve occasionally experimented with different listening habits. This curve in the path is when I found out who the murderer is that oak tree is the one I stared at after I hit pause and contemplated some tiny morsel of life wisdom. I have become so accustomed to combining daily walks with audiobooks that I associate certain sections of my neighborhood with specific narrative moments from the dozens of works I listened to over the course of 2021.
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