You may know Kareem Rahma from his popular online video series, Subway Takes, where he asks everyday New Yorkers to share their most outlandish opinions. Here, he shares the thought-provoking listens that have left the biggest impression on him, with audiobooks that cover topics ranging from geopolitics to the restaurant industry.
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past 20 years, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization and a moral grappling with what it means to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
I Regret Almost Everything is the entertaining, irreverent, and surprisingly moving memoir by the visionary restaurateur behind such iconic New York institutions as Balthazar and Pastis. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about his gritty London childhood, the angst of being a child actor, the instability of his two marriages and family relationships, his devastating stroke, and his Instagram notoriety.
The late legendary chef and author Anthony Bourdain uses his signature "take-no-prisoners" attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable audiobook. From his first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown, from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the East Village, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable.
"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad, will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child.
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove—a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Kareem Rahma is a comedian, entertainer, and creator of Subway Takes.
