In this episode of Audicted, cohosts Katie O’Connor and Kat Johnson share a few of their favorite family sagas, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. Additionally, for nonfiction fans, they call out some great listens about real life (dys)functional families. They also acknowledge the origins of Thanksgiving, and highlight a few recent listens by Native American authors in honor of Native American Heritage Month. Download or stream the full episode here.
Predicting 2022 trends in audio
Katie O’Connor: Personally, I think that in audio specifically, we are going to see more and more authors that are very cognizant of their audiobooks, and not just their physical or their eBooks and how those books are presented and experienced, but really making sure that the audio has its own unique experience. […] And I also think we're going to have more immersive audio experiences. And I think more fictionalized podcasts too.
Kat Johnson: Yeah, I think that's a great point. In fact, we just saw, our comedy editor just shared today the LA Times article about comedy podcasts taking off and how, you know, there's so much more scripted comedy happening, and a lot of writers are just finding it's a faster way to get what I want to get done. So, I think both creators and listeners are going to really find new things to play with and enjoy in that vein, for sure.
Is your family dysfunctional or eccentric?
KO: I think when you think of a good nonfiction family story, at least my head, more often than not, goes to David Sedaris. He is such a talented essayist and can really get at the heart of family dynamics and how different family members interact with each other, and how you can also exist in harmony when you are so different from each other. […] But there was a great soundbite from an interview David did last year on The Maris Review in which he says he's tired of people calling his family dysfunctional, that he thinks it's lazy. And I loved that. His word instead that he would pick is “eccentric.” And I think it's a great choice and a great spin, too, for people looking at their own families. You know, dysfunction is dysfunction. Dysfunction can be severe and maybe look at what's going on around you and sort of start to embrace the eccentricities instead. So, I really appreciated that framing.
Also in this episode:
Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature....
Listen to Middlespace when all the episodes become available on 11/18. Starship Captain George Cottonhammer (Will Forte), bored by his job, stops his ship in middle space and floats, doing nothing. He refuses to answer distress calls, dodges anything that smacks of work, chooses instead to focus on his love life and his idea dujour - opening an intergalactic burger franchise. And while he perfects the art of killing time, his crew moves from baffled to annoyed, to furious, to borderline mutinous. But when an ignored intergalactic distress call turns out to be a trap, the limits of how high someone can fail upwards are stretched, and the captain must, to his dismay, do something.
Pallavi is an aspiring writer living in California. Her mother, Usha, is thousands of miles away in Delhi - and obsessed with finding her daughter a husband....
The Princess Diaries meets Crazy Rich Asians in Emiko Jean’s Tokyo Ever After, a “refreshing, spot-on” (Booklist, starred review) story of an ordinary Japanese-American girl who discovers that her father is the Crown Prince of Japan....
Avery West's newfound family can shut down Prada when they want to shop in peace, and can just as easily order a bombing when they want to start a war....
The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with 12 children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease....
David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story....
Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story....
There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It's "masterful...white-hot...devastating" (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to pause....
In 1970, in one of the most infamous orca round-ups in history, an orca calf named Tokitae was taken from the islands off the coast of Seattle. For more than 50 years, she has lived at the Miami Seaquarium, in North America’s smallest orca tank.
Multiple lawsuits have been brought forward to free her, all of which so far have failed. Then, in 2017, an elder from the Lummi Nation received a message, carried from a dream. “Can anybody hear me?” Tokitae said, “I want to go home.” To the Lummi, Tokitae is not just an animal in captivity, she is a kidnapped relative. Now, members of the Lummi Nation are taking up the fight to return Tokitae to the Salish Sea, where she was born. But there’s a problem. Tokitae’s wild family is struggling for survival. Is it safe to bring her home, when her family here is facing extinction? “What happens to the orcas is going to happen to us,” says Jay Julius, the former Chairman of the Lummi Nation. “And what happens to the Indians is going to happen to everyone else.” Bonnie Swift grew up on Penn Cove, hearing the story of Tokitae’s capture, and as a child sang songs at protest events on Tokitae’s behalf. Now, in her thirties, Bonnie's come back to Tokitae. This is a story about killer whales, capture teams, Free Willy, the failures of environmental law, the extinction crisis, indigenous rights, grief, spirituality, and, most of all, the promise of repair.
Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother....
The first intersectional history of the Black and Native-American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America....
A sexy, hilarious, emotional new romance from New York Times best-selling author Emma Chase....
A series of brutal home invasions terrified Los Angeles in 1937. They ended in Chicago a year later with the arrest of African American teenager Robert Nixon, igniting racial tensions in an already appallingly divided city....
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Reasons cited when it was challenged: violence, profanity, sexually graphic
Eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation - a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson....
