What audiobooks would you recommend?

No takers so far so I'll comment on a few I have recently listened to:

Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends & Influence People

I thought it would be common sense and always put off this book but even though much of it is it has a lot of interesting anecdotes to help crystalize information and its old-school language was interesting on its own.

Peter Thiel - Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

A bit biased towards startups that are monopolies vs startups that add incremental value but useful in making that very distinction and its ramifications well.

Jim Collins - Good to Great

Not very useful, it is about what traits correlate with greatness (as defined through the stock market) and is largely free of the insights that someone who actually runs companies would have (it is written by outside academics). The approach has some interesting academic insights but not a lot of takeaways for an experienced entrepreneur. After all, it admits to not knowing how you can get there and is only trying to find out what those companies have in common that is statistically distinct from the companies that were not deemed "great".

Grant Cardone - The 10x Rule

Absolute garbage and so far the only audiobook that I didn't finish. His great insight boils down to just "try 10 times harder!" that he delivers in spittle-punctuated bursts repetitively. I mistakenly thought this book would be about the technology concept of needing to be ten times better than an incumbent but it is just some blowhard making a shitty motivational speech that you need to work harder. For people who actually do work as hard as they can and have for decades it is a completely vapid book.

Eric Ries - The Lean Startup

A good book on "lean" principles, with useful examples. Biggest takeaway is that the currency of startups is validated learning and that repeating this feedback loop is the top priority for a startup. In this sense it's not as much about leanness, per se, but more about using test-driven business processes.

David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day

I didn't know what I was getting into with this one, and ultimately it was just entertaining enough to get through it. Just a bunch of humorous essays really, kinda like a gay Dave Barry strung together into a book.

Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow

A deeply insightful read. Representing a lifetime of Kahneman's work this is dense with useful information on behavioral economics and behavioral psychology. Primarily it covers two mental "systems" that the name of the book derives from. One that is fast and intuitive and one that is slower and more logical. Knowing the deficiencies of each is useful and gives insight into biases in one's thinking that they produce.

Peter F Drucker - Managing Oneself

Drucker is always worth reading and this one is another is his management series of books that focuses on self-management and self-discipline.

Roger Fisher, William Ury - Getting to Yes

There are many books about negotiating and this is a good one whose main takeaways are the process of separating the person from the problem and focusing on interests instead of positions. Not one of the macho, hardass lines of negotiating books that focus on bluster and tricks this is one of the ones that focuses on the mentality that will help you both reach consensus with others as well as draw others to reach consensus with you.

David Allen - Getting Things Done

I've long used GTA principles in task tracking systems and while this had some useful information it was largely not new to me and he went into painstaking detail on a number of specific processes and methods to use that were not a good fit for me. However for someone not familiar with the general GTA philosophies there is useful information here.

Ryan Holiday - Growth Hacker Marketing

This book was garbage, it is incredibly superficial and does not contain any useful information to anyone who already knows what the term means.

David J. Bryce, Jeffrey H. Dyer, Nile W. Hatch - Competing Against Free (Harvard Business Review)

As expected this did not provide any magic bullets against competing against free, as there really aren't any. Was more of a validation of that knowledge as well as a crystallization of other "free" economy principles from other books.

Cormac McCarthy - The Sunset Limited

Was interesting enough, but I guess I prefer non-fiction in this medium. I prefer to immerse myself in fiction but non-fiction is easier to absorb while driving and doing other things.

Dan Harris - 10% Happier

Was ok. Doesn't contain much useful information on mindfulness itself, but it is a good autobiographical tale about someone's path to selecting mindfulness for themselves. In short it is a decently entertaining read to help convince you to practice mindfulness but doesn't contain any insight into doing so.

Mark Cuban - How to Win at the Sport of Business

Meh, not very useful and no informational takeaways but entertaining enough to finish.

Seth Freeman - The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal

Decent, not great. Relies too much on its silly acronyms ("I FORESAW IT!") and is repetitive but has useful information on a negotiating framework.

Spencer Johnson - Who Moved My Cheese?

Completely and utterly vapid. It is just a series of childlike anecdotes preaching flexibility to change with no substantiation of the advice given or useful insight into how to become more adaptable. It must be a best seller just because of management buying it for their workers to try to pave over some changes they are about to ram down their throats.


Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson - Rework

This comes from informed people but is a superficial treatment. Nevertheless the information it does contain, though not much, is useful to those who are not familiar with them. Just be sure you know going in that this is not a very deep attempt to educate.

Sam Harris - Waking Up

Again, not much useful information on implementing mindfulness into your toolbox but strong scientific validation of the concept from someone who nobody will accuse of being a spiritualist.

Chris Anderson - Free

Surprisingly insightful book on free as a strategy vs a gimmick and why it is here to stay.

Clayton M. Christensen - The Innovator's Dilemma

Yet another concept that I ended up learning long before ever getting to the book but there were still a lot of opportunities to crystalize information I already had and my big takeaway from this is to modify the resource allocation processes in order to combat the dilemma (i.e. make your skunkworks resource allocation independent).


Kerry Patterson - Crucial Conversations

As with any book on communication it can get to basic common sense but the overall framework it presents is useful and accessible.

Not that much into nonfiction, let alone behavior economics.

In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, Narrated by Scott Brick (one of my favorite audiobook narrators);
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki;
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic by Gordon Wood, Narrated by: Robert Fass;
The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by and narrated by Brian Christian;

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by and narrated by John Vaillant;

ESSAYS:
The Wordy Shipmates by and narrated by Sarah Vowell. Any audiobook by Sarah Vowell.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by and narrated by David Sedaris.

Physics of the future [sound recording] : [how science will change daily life by 2100] / Michio Kaku.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick and narrated by George Guidall.

"In The Plex" the story of Google's early days. Fabulous listen...

Hmm, I actually purchased this book to read on Kindle but have not yet, will add it to my audiobook wishlist and might get to it faster that way.

Legacy of Ashes was already in my wishlist but the other books weren't and I've added them. Not looking for essays for now (really trying to use the format for longform, or longer form).

I've added these two to my wishlist as well.

"My Lobotomy". True story of the history of the procedure and a rare firsthand account. Mind blowing in more ways than one.

Added this one to the wish list as well, psychology is a subject I am generally interested in recommendations for. Thanks!

Just bought the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy trilogy on audiobook, gonna be a marathon, can anyone get me hyped up for that? I know plenty of A2Kers love them and maybe someone can convince me to get interested enough to start them.

Not sure if this is going to inspire you.....but it would be an interesting experiment in the sociology and evolution of humour, perhaps?

The wild card is your personality, of course, and that you tend to be very hard to please. Then again, you sometimes like goofy stuff that surprises me.

My hypothesis is that a lot of the humour was new and fresh at the time...it won't be now. I suspect it's also more of a British fatalistic kind of humour than you will like.

In other words, I suspect it's pretty dated now.

Prove me wrong!

Would you describe it as a comedy (I barely know anything about it)? Do you think it will do well in audio book medium?

It's absolutely a comedy.

It's been a book, a radio series, a tv show and a film.

Audiobook is made for it.

Ok, I went out of my way to find the narrators that people recommended so hopefully it will be good.

And?

Still have a book to finish before I get started. I'll give that one a try next but I've been pretty busy and haven't had a lot of quiet time.

Oh...no worries. Thought you were set to go.

I know this is late, but Hitchhikers Guide started out as a radio series, before the book before the tv series and before the film.

If you're going to listen to anything listen to the radio series, the audiobook won'tbe anyway near as good.

I bet Peter Jones isn't playing the book.