We all know there are different types of readers. You have your spicy girlies, your DNFer’s, your collectors, your BookTokers, your book club girlies and your 100+ reads a year ladies. And let’s face it, hundreds of other kinds. But there are layers to audiobook listeners too. Where you listen, the speed you listen at and what you listen to is a fun mix of entertainment on the go and a different style of immersion. Find out which you are and get paired with the right book for your type.

The Commuter

What she needs? A little feel-good while getting cut off in traffic:

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Have you ever heard the advice that, if you have something to say to someone but just can’t, write them a letter? Sybil Van Antwerp has gone through life following this rule like law. Anyone, for any reason, she writes and sends off letters. She’s kept this routine through raising her children, through building her career as a lawyer, even through her divorce. She’s sent her letters to all but one recipient, one she cannot bring herself to send her many messages off to. Once she receives a letter that digs up her worst feelings, Sybil is forced to reckon with the truth that in order to move forward for herself, she needs her letter to be read.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon

Does everyone else anthropomorphize their appliances, or just me? In a smart house especially, the things just seem to have a mind of their own. In Harold and Edie’s house, they have a little

eavesdropper in their sentient Roomba. Heartened by listening to Harold read To Kill a Mockingbird to Edie in her dying days, the Roomba names herself Scout and sets off to live her own adventure. In the wake of Edie’s death, Harold is being forced out of his home by the ever-surveilling Grid. Scout, the other appliances, and some unexpected human helpers must band together to save their home.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Before I Knew I Loved You by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Welcome back to the Funiculi Funicula Cafe, where you can travel through time so long as you return to the present before your coffee gets cold. Visitors can seek to change their fate, learn more about loved ones, and even reconnect with love lost provided they make it back to the cafe in time. In this installment, four new guests are searching for something thought long lost. A child for his father who has passed on, a daughter for her estranged mother, a man for the love that disappeared without a trace, and a woman for her uncertain future. All four will leave having transcended time and warmed by the knowledge of the boundlessness of love.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Hot Girl Walker

What she needs? A perfect workout playlist that can be accessed with a library card.

Go Gentle by Maria Semple

Adora wants nothing more than the perfect life she’s carved out for herself. A steady job, a loving daughter, a group of friends who live on the same floor as her in a historic relic of a building in New York City’s Upper West Side– she couldn’t be more at peace if Carrie Bradshaw were her downstairs neighbor. Much like Carrie, though, her orderly life is disrupted upon a chance meeting with an alluring stranger. Now full of desire, Adora digs herself deeper into the pits of black market dealings and international dilemmas all in the hunt for more.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

Look, we’re not accusing the eighty-one-year-old Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick of multiple homicides, but we’re not not doing that, and the coincidences over the years add up to be pretty damning. In her old age she’s made a very calm life for herself in her cozy home on her cozy street minding everybody else’s business, and would much prefer if everyone else would just leave her and her past alone. When a young girl with a penchant for asking too many questions moves in as the new neighbor, her first self-assigned mission is finding out the history behind “Mad Mabel” (and the numerous suspicious deaths in her past) by trying to break past Elsie’s concrete emotional walls and befriend her.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley

Sometimes being the change you want to see in the world takes a little more initiative than you’d think. In an effort to encourage people to show off their more honest selves to the world, Julian Jessop writes his own truth in a nondescript little notebook and leaves it behind in a coffee shop. When the owner, Monica, finds it and can’t help but read through, she’s inspired to add her own entry and leave it in a nearby wine bar. As the notebook makes its rounds and gains entries from the deepest parts of people’s secret souls, the authors decide to find one another in person.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

High Speedster

What she needs? A list of 2x listens so she can keep her reading goal sky-high, but still indulge in long-form literature.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Spanning seventy-seven years is the story of three generations of a family in Kerala who suffer from a different kind of generational curse: Each generation, one member of the family dies by drowning. The matriarch of the family once started as a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s Christian community mourning the loss of her father as she married her forty-year-old husband. We follow her life shift and change like light across the surface of water across the many years as she holds fast to her faith and her love for the growing family she presides over.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

In Mississippi in the grips of the Great Depression, three ladies are all trying their best to survive. Meg is trying to imagine any sort of future for herself as an unadoptable orphan, Birdie’s understanding of her life is crashing down around her, and Charlie’s simply got nothing left to lose. Between the three of them they devise a plan to take back control of their own lives in the midst of socioeconomic calamity where one wrong move could destroy them all beyond repair.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Thrill-Seeker

What she needs? A library of audiobooks that feel like her true crime podcasts.

The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke

Imagine your favorite bestselling author invites you, a floundering author, to his private island for the weekend. Now imagine that, once you arrive, you’re stuck there with five other authors and also your idol is dead. This is the reality of Arthur Fletch, who has died without finishing his final novel. His agent and editor offer the six guests on the island another chance at literary life: Whoever can write the perfect final chapter will have the full creative support they need to revive their writing career along with a life-changing sum of money. As every author knows, there’s no better way to crunch out a hit than with an impossible seventy-two hour deadline. With these kinds of killer stakes, is it really such a mystery that everything goes awry?

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

Sonia Wilson is left with no career prospects after the death of her father in 1899, whose reputation as a famed scientist allowed her to pursue a career as a scientific illustrator. Out of options and out of money, she takes the first hand reached out to her by Dr. Halder of North Carolina. As she illustrates his insects deep in the woods, the isolation seems to creep in on her as darker and darker incidents keep catching her eye. Locals and animals alike act strangely, and rumors of blood thieves pique her scientific curiosity. As she discovers more of Halder’s secrets, Sonia finds that she may become his next specimen.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Anatomy of an Alibi by Ashley Elston

Benjamin Bayliss has secrets, and two women have decided to team together to sniff them out. His wife Camille knows her husband is keeping things from her but can’t escape from under his watchful eye for long enough to investigate. Aubrey Price has carried the burden of one terrible night with her for years and believes Benjamin may be the key to getting her answers, but she can’t get in close on her own. When Aubrey and Camille join together to uncover the truth one night, Benjamin wakes up dead the next morning. Only one of them has an alibi for the time of the murder.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Narrator Chaser

What she needs? A bevy of books that feels like her favorite celebrity reading a bedtime story.

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

Read to us by the author herself with her characteristic dry but evocative delivery, the story follows high schooler Waldo who is cursed to always want more. She fills this wanting through meaningless doomscrolling and bouncing between digital shopping carts until she falls head-over-heels infatuated with her creative writing teacher Mr. Korgy. He’s everything a girl would risk it all for: balding, aging, at a dead-end in his career, and–most of all– married. Waldo has never been afraid to take what she wants, and what she wants right now is to jump Mr. Korgy’s bones. But what’s left once she gets everything she wants?

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Margot’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

Elle Fanning stars in both the new television series as well as in the audiobook as our narrator, and she brings every second of her brilliant theatrical presence to the page. We follow Margot, who has always been able to look out for herself because there’s never been anybody else to do it. She thought the way to success was to enroll at junior college and pursue her education, but falling into an affair with her professor and becoming pregnant clearly weren’t part of the plan. Now she’s twenty, a mother, and all alone again with nowhere to turn. She’s desperate for cash, and her formerly-pro-wrestler-and-currently-estranged father shows up needing a place to stay, so she makes the concession for him to stay so she can make ends meet. When she starts to gain a following on OnlyFans by following her father’s performance advice, she jumps from barely scraping by to a sex industry superstar before she can take a full breath. Now the only question remaining is: is the fame worth what it costs?

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

There’s nowhere in the world of art that Lin Manuel-Miranda hasn’t touched, and award-winning audiobook narration is no exception. He breathes life into the story of Aristotle, a young Mexican-American teen in 1980’s Texas with a severe chip on his shoulder, a brother in prison, and a sneaking suspicion that he might not love the same way as everyone else. When Dante, a gentle dreamer whose head seems to live in the clouds, enters Ari’s life, it throws everything about his world into a tailspin. The two form an unlikely friendship that grows much deeper than either boy had prepared for. While Dante accepts his growing feelings, Ari is quick to push them aside until he is forced to confront them, along with his feelings about himself. Ari’s journey to self-acceptance is not so straight and narrow, however, as he learns secrets about his family that force him to confront his own path that he’d been forging for himself, and whether or not he’s meant to keep going down it or forge a new one with no roadmap.

Listen to the audiobook now: Amazon