7 Great Audiobooks for Long Drives, as Recommended by Vogue Editors
Summer is road-trip season; the time to fill up your trunk, roll down your windows, and have a bit of an adventure. Yet the problem of making untold hours in the car actually fun is a persistent one. Music helps, of course, as do games—but nothing can entertain and edify quite like a good audiobook. (There’s a reason that books on tape were such a thing!) Whether you’re in the market for a twisty thriller or a moving biography; a collection of uproariously funny essays or a steamy new novel, here are seven books to enjoy on your way to wherever it is you may be going.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Nineteen-hour audiobooks generally feel too daunting to me, unless the author and narrator is Michelle Obama telling her life story, from growing up on the South Side of Chicago as a gifted and talented student to meeting her hot shot, cigarette-smoking law intern, Barack Obama, and eventually moving to the White House. Not only is it a beautiful story that actually restored my faith in the American dream, but her voice is like butter.—Michelle Ruiz
Becoming by Michelle Obama
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Planning on road-tripping across America (and, maybe, making your way back too)? Listen to all 26 hours of Marlon James’s Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings. One of the main stumbling blocks of the (amazing) book, for many, is the Jamaican patois that the multitude of characters speak—so listening to them instead of reading them, to me, makes this audio version preferable to the actual book. It’s not only an incredibly gripping story—it’s an astounding cultural history of Jamaica and its various subcultures, from the rampant organized crime to the nascent rise of Bob Marley.—Corey Seymour
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Calypso by David Sedaris
I can’t readily imagine a better traveling companion than David Sedaris, whose 2018 book of autobiographical essays, Calypso, wends through his childhood; his work; his relationship to his father, his four siblings, and his longtime partner, Hugh; and the time that he befriended a fox and called it “Carol.” They sing on the page, but as read by Sedaris, with his wonderfully distinctive delivery style—alternately breathlessly confessional and wry—the pieces are somehow even more delightful.—Marley Marius
