Bookspace Recommendations

How to Protect Bookstores and Why

The Present and Future of Bookselling

By: Danny Caine
Narrated by: Danny Caine
Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

“I love bookshop origin stories so this was an absolute treat! Caine profiles 12 independent bookstores with obvious enthusiasm and adoration for his fellow bookstore owners and their varied causes and identities. Each case study ends with an action step on how to support and protect bookstores which looks beyond simply showing up and spending... Read more

There's Always This Year

On Basketball and Ascension

By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

“Using basketball as a vehicle for reflection of East Columbus history and personal memoir, There’s Always This Year is a triumph of contemplative, emotionally-rich writing that will have you wiping tears and on the edge of your seat. Read more

Why Fish Don't Exist

A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

By: Lulu Miller
Narrated by: Lulu Miller
Length: 4 hours 55 minutes

“This is a book that is going to stay with me for a long time. Miller, motivated by her relationship with her father, and a lifelong search for meaning, closely examines David Starr Jordan, the larger-than-life father of American Ichthyology and founding president of Stanford University. If you ever wondered how fish identification and eugenics... Read more

All Fours

A Novel

By: Miranda July
Narrated by: Miranda July
Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

“At times shocking, but always riveting. I devoured this book and enjoyed every moment. Read more

Unlearning Shame

How We Can Reject Self-Blame Culture and Reclaim Our Power

By: Devon Price, PhD
Narrated by: Devon Price, PhD
Length: 9 hours 28 minutes

Learn to identify—and combat—Systemic Shame, the feeling of self-hatred and disempowerment that comes from living in a society that blames individuals for systemic problems, with this invaluable resource from the social psychologist and author of Unmasking Autism.

Systemic Shame is the socially engineered self-loathing that says we are solely to... Read more

The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

By: David Graeber & David Wengrow
Narrated by: Mark Williams
Length: 24 hours 19 minutes

“This book packs the foundations of modern political philosophy with dynamite and lights the fuse! Through recent advances in archaeology and anthropology, Davids Graeber and Wengrow show us a dizzying range of sophisticated models of human social organization among indigenous peoples, around the world, over tens of thousands of years,... Read more

README.txt

A Memoir

By: Chelsea Manning
Narrated by: Chelsea Manning
Length: 9 hours 4 minutes

“I really didn't know anything about Chelsea Manning or her whistleblowing and activism. This book gives explicit insight into what was going on with her and why she made the decisions she did. It left me wondering more about her life after her incarceration ended. Read more

The Future Is Disabled

Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Narrated by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and... Read more

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Narrated by: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Length: 16 hours 44 minutes

“This is so inspirational and informative. A collection of essays that are wonderful to listen to. Read more

Heavy

An American Memoir

By: Kiese Laymon
Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
Length: 6 hours 17 minutes

“An incredibly generous, tender, and searingly honest book. Kiese Laymon is hands down one of the most talented American writers publishing right now. HEAVY overflows with deep love and deep pain. Laymon holds up a mirror to the US past, present - "We did not have to be this way. We will not ever have to be this way." I'm going back to read... Read more

In the Dream House

A Memoir

By: Carmen Maria Machado
Narrated by: Carmen Maria Machado
Length: 5 hours 28 minutes

“In the most inventive memoir I've read, Machado uses narrative tropes in a series of fragments and vignettes to break down the ways in which she, herself, was breaking down in an abusive same-sex relationship. A book about 'archival silence,' about inventing a language to tell a story. Read more

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

By: Jia Tolentino
Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire
 
Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia... Read more

Caste (Oprah's Book Club)

The Origins of Our Discontents

By: Isabel Wilkerson
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 15 hours 10 minutes

“Possibly one of the most important books I've read in the last decade. Caste examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America. Wondering how America came to this? This book has brutal, unflinching answers. Read more

The Power of Fun

How to Feel Alive Again

By: Catherine Price
Narrated by: Catherine Price
Length: 9 hours 15 minutes

If you’re not having fun, you’re not fully living. The author of How to Break Up with Your Phone makes the case that, far from being frivolous, fun is actually critical to our well-being—and shows us how to have more of it.

“This delightful book might just be what we need to start flourishing.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Adam... Read more

Bullshit Jobs

A Theory

By: David Graeber
Narrated by: Christopher Ragland
Length: 12 hours 39 minutes

From David Graeber, the bestselling author of The Dawn of Everything and Debt—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences.

Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this... Read more

Dig

By: A.S. King
Narrated by: A.S. King, Mike Chamberlain, Tonya Cornelisse & Kirby Heyborne
Length: 10 hours 19 minutes

Winner of the Michael L. Printz Medal

★“King’s narrative concerns are racism, patriarchy, colonialism, white privilege, and the ingrained systems that perpetuate them. . . . [Dig] will speak profoundly to a generation of young people who are waking up to the societal sins of the past and working toward a more equitable future.”—Horn Book, starred... Read more

How to Change Your Mind

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

By: Michael Pollan
Narrated by: Michael Pollan
Length: 13 hours 34 minutes

“Pollan didn’t create the local food movement, but his books brought our attention to it, catapulting the conversation to farmers markets and dinner tables everywhere. In How To Change Your Mind, Pollan has turned his eye to psychedelic drugs. What The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Rules did for food, this book is set to do in the fields of end of... Read more

A Little Devil in America

Notes in Praise of Black Performance

By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 9 hours 38 minutes

“Using Black performance as a loose organizing principle, Abdurraqib has written a brilliant, expansive, insightful, and personal book. There is something of Montaigne’s penchant for humility and brilliance in equal measure; of Susan Sontag’s use of cultural criticism to understand history and the self; of Zadie Smith’s verbal wizardry,... Read more