The September Audiobook of the Month

By Dustin Rowles | Books | September 30, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Books | September 30, 2024 |

To be honest, the two best audiobooks I listened to this month were not September releases. Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, a July release, wins the prize for perhaps the best book with the worst cover I’ve ever seen — an unexpected delight that rivals I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue as the most enjoyable book I’ve consumed in 2024. Meanwhile, Chris Whitaker’s June release, All the Colors in the Dark, is now my favorite book of the year — a perfectly written, page-turning crime thriller that delivers on so many levels, it may go down as one of the most satisfying reads in years. Endings are hard. Whitaker nails it.

I was happy for these unexpected finds because the two books I was most looking forward to in September, Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name and Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible, were both somewhat disappointing — especially Haig’s, after the otherworldly brilliance of The Midnight Library. Elsewhere, Elizabeth Strout displayed her trademark consistency with the beautifully written Tell Me Everything, where she continues to mine so many of the characters she’s created over the years.

Amid all of that, my favorite September release was an audiobook I only meant to sample after my frustration with Haig’s latest: Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. I’d never read Senna before and didn’t even realize until halfway through the novel that she is a biracial woman married to Percival Everett, who wrote (among others) the spectacular James earlier this year — a re-imagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s traveling companion.

Not surprisingly, Colored Television is about a biracial adjunct professor, Jane — best known for writing about biracial characters — who is married to a Black artist. Jane is the kind of literary writer who refuses to sell out until the book she’s been working on for a decade is rejected by her publisher. Frustrated by trying to live like someone socioeconomically better off on an adjunct professor’s salary, Jane attempts to sell out by becoming a television writer, even stealing her friend’s idea to pitch a prestige comedy about a biracial family.

It’s terrific literary fiction that manages to skewer both Hollywood and the literary world. As a Gen X’er who can’t bring himself to sell out, I always enjoy reading about other Gen X’ers who struggle with an issue that seems nonexistent to younger generations, who appear driven by a desire to sell out. It’s sharply written and much funnier than I anticipated. Actress Kristen Ariza did a fantastic job with the narration, and given the racial politics involved in telling this story, it came with a fairly high degree of difficulty.

Not for nothing, but are Senna and Everett the most talented living literary couple?

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