Doughty, Caitlin. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. Recorded Bks. ISBN 9781490646268. Read by the author.
Doughty’s tales of her time working in an Oakland, CA, crematory are full of bizarre encounters, gallows humor, and vivid characters (both living and dead). She describes caring for bodies of all shapes and sizes in this eye-opening memoir that shows how our fear of dying warps our culture and society.
Essbaum, Jill Alexander. Hausfrau. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553551600. Read by Mozhan Marno.
American Anna Benz lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno, and their three young children in a beautiful suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. She tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs. But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, tensions escalate and her lies start to spin out of control. Essbaum’s debut novel examines marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and the self.
Jurafsky, Dan. The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. Blackstone. ISBN 9781469029900. Read by Steven Menasche.
Stanford University linguist Jurafsky dives into the hidden history of food as revealed in the words we use for it. (Why do we eat toast for breakfast and then toast to good health at dinner?) Jurafsky points out the subtle meanings hidden in filler words such as “rich” and “crispy,” zeroes in on the metaphors and storytelling tropes we rely on in restaurant reviews, and charts a microuniverse of marketing language on the back of a bag of potato chips. With Jurafsky’s insight, such words as ketchup, macaron, and even salad become living fossils containing the patterns of early global exploration that predate our modern fusion-filled world.
Rubin, Gretchen. Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780553551723. Read by the author.
It takes work to make a habit, but once that habit is set, we can harness its energy to build a happier, stronger, more productive life. So if they are key to change, then what we really need to know is: How do we change our habits? Better than Before presents a practical, concrete framework to allow readers to understand their habits—and to change them for good.
Simon, Scott. Unforgettable: A Mother and Son’s Final Days—and the Lessons that Last a Lifetime. Macmillan Audio. ISBN 9781427261281. Read by the author.
When NPR Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon began tweeting from his mother’s hospital room, he didn’t know that his missives would soon spread well beyond his 1.2 million followers. Squeezing the magnitude of his final days with her into 140-character updates, Simon chronicled his mother’s death and reflected on her life, revealing her humor and strength, and celebrating the love of family. Here Simon offers a deeply affecting, heart-wrenching memoir. His mother was a glamorous woman of the Mad Men era who worked in nightclubs, modeled, dated mobsters and movie stars, and was a brave single parent to young Scott Simon.