I'm in the mood for non-fiction

February 6, 2023 9:51 AM

I'm in the mood to listen to a non-fiction audiobook. Non-memoir. Engaging. Suitable for casual listening. Other thoughts and things I've liked before inside.

I want an audiobook right now, so if you know something that really needs to be read as a book (because diagrams or whatever), you can recommend it and maybe I'll read it another time but please warn me off doing it as an audiobook.

Non-Ficiton books I've liked:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Code Book (would not work as audiobook)
The Spirit Catches you and You fall down
The Unlikely Disciple: A sinner at America's Holiest University
The Rebbe's Army
What If (but note this would suck as an audiobook)
Cosmos
The Ghost Map
The Devil in the White City
Traffic
Arctic Grail
Empire of the Bay
Into Thin AIr
How to Read Water (would not work as audibook)

I would be especially interested in investigation based (not crime-detail-based) true crime. I just got "How to Solve a Cole Case" from the library and it's awful. But if it were what I expected it to be (a book about how citizen-detective types do their work), that would be cool. But it need not be this. Just annoyed that I thought I was getting that and then it's something else.

Tell me what engaging non-fiction you've read or heard recently.

posted by If only I had a penguin... to Media & Arts (22 answers total)

I listened to Hidden Figures a few months ago and enjoyed it.

I read (with my eyeballs) Call the Midwife earlier this year, didn't do the audiobook, but I bet it would listen nice, too.
posted by phunniemee at 9:58 AM on February 6, 2023

Say Nothing by Patrick Keefe
Watergate: a New History by Garrett Graff
Bad Blood by John Carryeou
Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz
posted by tafetta, darling! at 9:59 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright

Both of Isabel Wilkerson's books: Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

What If 2 is actually good as an audiobook - narrated by Wil Wheaton, who painstakingly describes all the stick figure cartoons in between the text.
posted by lizard music at 10:08 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not crime-y, but I recently listened to Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States and hoo-buddy does it have an all-star cast. From the press release: John Slattery voice the Marquis de Lafayette; Parks and Recreation star Nick Offerman portray George Washington; Portlandia mastermind and SNL comedian Fred Armisen as Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben; Boardwalk Empire's Bobby Cannavale as Benjamin Franklin; John Hodgman of The Daily Show as John Adams; and comedian, actor and writer Patton Oswalt, who plays Thomas Jefferson.

And obviously Sarah Vowell narrates. Pretty fun American history, read by some great actors.
posted by nushustu at 10:17 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Trace by Prof Patricia Wiltshire who is a forensic palynologist. Her core biz is collecting and characterising plant pollen and fungal spores from dead bodies, brake-pedals and bin-bags; and matching those data to a location.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland is a sort of sequel to John Berger's A Fortunate Man 1966. Both look at the lives of a rural doctor in the same UK practice separated by 50 years.

Short Life in a Strange World Birth to Death in 42 Panels is Toby Ferris' attempt to stand in front of, and forensically look at, the complete oeuvre of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:29 AM on February 6, 2023

Just learned about Robert Waldinger's book (and audiobook) "The Good Life". Spoilers: longest ever study of human happiness reveals it's all about relationships. He has a nice voice. There are multiple studies. Mostly white men, but probably has some relevance for anyone (plus, IMHO, maybe the world would be better if there were fewer desperately unhappy white men...)
posted by amtho at 10:33 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ben Macintyre does a lot of espionage history from WWII (Rogue Heroes; Operation Mincemeat; Double Cross) through the Cold War (A Spy Among Friends; The Spy and the Traitor). I've enjoyed every one of his books I've read so far. I don't do audiobooks so I can't specifically vouch for them, but I don't recall any of the books being dependent on graphics.
posted by fedward at 10:41 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece by Noah Charney, narrated by John Allen Nelson was incredibly interesting and was narrated well. Art history + true crime.

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, its Chaotic Founding... its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis, written and narrated by Sam Anderson. I'm not sure how I came across this, because I'm not interested in basketball or Oklahoma or Oklahoma City. But I thoroughly enjoyed learning about how the state was stolen by white settlers, how it grew and what happened with the basketball team.
posted by OrangeDisk at 10:47 AM on February 6, 2023

Atomic Adventures by James Mahaffey -- i've probably listened to this book 20 times. Really interesting stories about..nuclear stuff. Good narration too.
posted by capnsue at 10:47 AM on February 6, 2023

I read the book, rather than listened, but I think The Premonition by Michael Lewis might be something you'd be interested in
posted by TimHare at 10:49 AM on February 6, 2023

I was coming here to say Michael Lewis's books in general make good audio listens, I liked both The Big Short and Flash Boys (about high frequency trading.) I will second Carreyou's Bad Blood.

I didn't do it as an audiobook but Dan Davies' Lying for Money was one of my favorite reads of the year in 2021. It's about corporate financial fraud economy-wide, which gives room for the most colorful anecdotes from the world of white collar grifters in between the meet of the stuff.

Another one I assume would work well on audio book, and that gibes with other books you've liked, is Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, about the African American migration away from the south.
posted by mark k at 11:06 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think “The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century” by Kirk W. Johnson really fits the bill both in the content of the book you’re looking for and in a similar style to some of the other non fiction books you mentioned. I might have listened to it as an audiobook or read it, I can’t remember. But I don’t think there’s anything about it that requires it to be in one format rather than another
posted by raccoon409 at 11:19 AM on February 6, 2023

The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
posted by foxmardou at 12:12 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Though I didn't listen to it, I really enjoyed Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th-Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles, the story of the 1927 Saint Francis Dam collapse, which goes into the history of bringing water to Los Angeles and looks into the Saint Francis Dam disaster in detail (and the audiobook is cheap, if you intend to buy it).

If you enjoyed Devil In The White City you'll enjoy just about everything by Erik Larsen.
posted by lhauser at 12:57 PM on February 6, 2023

The Library Book by Susan Orlean - at the heart of it, there's a mystery of a fire at the Los Angeles Library, but it's not quite a crime book.

If you're interested in religion/cults, then Educated is a great book.

Seconding Bill Bryson (The Body, or just about any other book by him. At Home was quite interesting too.)
posted by hydra77 at 1:53 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Forest Unseen doesn't fit your categories, but it's well out of my wheelhouse and I love it, so you just might too. David Haskell is a biologist who selects a tiny bit of old-growth forest in Tennessee and visits it almost daily over the course of a year, describing what he sees and talking about how the individual plants and animals function as part of a living ecosystem. The language is gorgeous - he makes science sound like poetry while telling fascinating stories.
posted by DrGail at 2:31 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

How about An immense world by Ed Yong? (I just finished the text version, no idea how good the audio version is, it's read by the author)
posted by dhruva at 4:52 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just happen to have produced an audiobook about the current state of public radio, called PLEDGE The Public Radio Fund Drive. I'm turning it into a musical and it came from a book. So, there's the entertainment value on one side and the deep dive value one the other. Altogether, it's 16 hours of listening.
posted by CollectiveMind at 8:24 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read it rather than listened to it but I really enjoyed Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt. It's about the women computers who did the calculations in the early days of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
posted by Constance Mirabella at 8:35 PM on February 6, 2023

I don't do Audiobooks but the sciency non-fiction I really liked and go back to often.

A Short History of Nearly Everything : Bill Bryson
Emperor of Maladies and Gene : Siddhartha Mukherjee
Behave: Robert Sapolsky
Who We Are: David Reich
Social Intelligence : Daniel Goleman
Thinking Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman
The Perfectionists : Simon Winchester
Sapiens : Yuval Noah Harari
posted by indianbadger1 at 11:17 AM on February 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

No Mary Roach here yet?? They are absolutely fantastic as audiobooks (I've never read one any other way).
posted by Lyn Never at 2:30 PM on February 7, 2023

David Grann's books are gripping. A film adaptation of his bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon is (supposedly) coming out this year.
posted by codhavereturned at 6:47 AM on February 13, 2023