Tune Out At Family Gatherings with These Audiobooks
The holidays mean spending more time with our family and loved ones. We all know that can be a great thing. But for many of us, time spent with family can also be highly stressful. If you love books as much as we do (and you must, because you’re here), then what you really need is a good audiobook to distract you at those moments when your family becomes too much to bear. This season, while your family is gathered at the table arguing about politics or who gets the last drumstick, just discreetly pop in your earbuds and get one of these audiobooks going. We promise you they won’t notice, and tuning out for a few hours might be just what you need to stay sane this Christmas!
What’s the best medicine for a stressful holiday season? Laughter, of course. And really, what’s funnier than an audiobook read by the master of comedic essays himself, David Sedaris? A Carnival of Snackery is Sedaris’s second book of diary entries, this one spanning from 2003 to 2023. In this book, Sedaris covers everything from dirty jokes to George W. Bush and Donald Trump. His insights are much more entertaining than listening to what your family has to say about these topics, we promise.
This holiday season, tune out by spending time with a family even funnier and more insightful than your own. Join real-life sisters Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar as they share hilarious, intergenerational anecdotes about everyday experiences of racism. While family might not always see eye to eye, but there’s one thing the Ruffin sisters can always agree on: racism hasn’t gone anywhere.
Love the holidays, but don’t love all the family drama? Then forget your own holiday gathering and tune into one that’s decidedly cuter. A Cat Café Christmas is an opposites attract holiday romance about the three C’s: Christmas, coffee, and cats. Kara Ingalls realized her dream when she opened the Meow and Furrever Cat Café. But the café has been slow lately, and if she can’t find some way to get it out of the red before the holidays, she’s afraid she’ll have to shut it down for good. When marketing guru Ben Reese hatches the perfect plan to get the café back in the green, she knows she would be a fool to stay no. While the two try to keep things professional, neither can deny the spark between them.
For those who would prefer to escape the world they know entirely, there’s In the Shadow Garden by Liz Parker. With this book, tune out your decidedly un-magic family and tune in to this family of witches. The three witches of the Haywood family can cure any heartache and the wonders of their shadow garden are known throughout Yarrow, Kentucky. But so is their bitter rivalry with the Bonners. It all started twenty years ago when the town forgot an entire summer. One person died. One disappeared. No one remembers what happened. But as events from that summer start to come to like, the Bonner and Haywood families must finally reckon with their decades-long feud.
Emily Martin has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi. She’s a contributing editor at Book Riot and blogs/podcasts at Book Squad Goals.