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7 Nonfiction Audiobooks Perfect for Long Road Trips

These entertaining memoirs, histories and other great stories will make the hours fly by

From left to right, top to bottom: This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan, Finding Me by Viola Davis, the Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore, 8 Rules of Love by Jay Shetty, Trejo by Danny Trejo, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, the Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
From top left: Penguin Publishing, HarperAudio, Sourcebooks, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon and Schuster, Knopf Publishing Group, Little, Brown and Company
By

Christina Ianzito,

 &

Bethanne Patrick,

 
AARP
AARP
Published November 15, 2021
/ Updated May 02, 2023

When you have many hours of driving ahead of you — especially the monotonous, highway kind of driving — what could be better than an immersive, informative audiobook to help make the trip pass more quickly? The seven books below, all released in the past few years, make for great reading but are especially entertaining for listening thanks to top-notch narration.

Finding Me

Written and narrated by Viola Davis

Davis’ memoir, Finding Me, was a huge bestseller last year, detailing the actor’s rise from a troubled childhood in Rhode Island to beloved Emmy- and Oscar-winning star, most recently of The Woman King. The self-narrated audio version is particularly well done; The New York Times, among others, dubbed it one of 2022’s best audiobooks. Now Davis, 57, has received yet more kudos for her narrated memoir: It won audiobook of the year at this spring’s Audie Awards, the big industry event dedicated to “recognizing distinction in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment.”

Listening time: 9 hours, 15 minutes

 8 Rules of Love: How to Find It, Keep It and Let It Go

Written and narrated by Jay Shetty

Self-help-style books often work well in audio form — and this is one you might want to listen to with your honey on your next road trip (if it’s not too awkward). It’ll certainly be fodder for discussion. Shetty, 35, is host of the podcast On Purpose and author of the best-selling 2020 book Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day, offering lessons on living your best life, based on principles that Shetty absorbed living in India as a Hindu monk for three years. He offers similarly monk-like wisdom in his 2023 book, presenting love as a daily practice, like meditation, that requires effort and attention. Love is not about “creating a perfect relationship,” he says, but rather “learning to navigate the imperfections that are intrinsic to ourselves, our partners and life itself.”  

Listening time: 10 hours, 21 minutes

Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood

Written and narrated by Danny Trejo

“I’ve always been in a gang of some sort,” says Mexican American actor and restaurateur Danny Trejo, 78, “even if it was five- and six-year-old girls.” He opens his 2021 memoir, cowritten by Donal Logue, with a story about himself, his female cousins and a dead cat, then notes that he and the girls — like everyone in his family — ended up in prison at some point in their lives. A troubled kid growing up in Los Angeles, Trejo got hooked on heroin at age 12, and caught up in violence and crime that led to years in and out of hard-core prisons like Folsom and San Quentin. He recounts these inauspicious beginnings (“I always figured I’d die in prison,” he says), as well as his journey to acting success. Now sober for 53 years and “the most killed actor in Hollywood history,” thanks to the many bad-guy roles he’s aced (Heat, Machete, From Dusk Till Dawn), he’s devoted to helping others recover from addiction, including his two adult children. Narrating in his gravelly voice, he offers a remarkably candid and often inspiring life story. 

Listening time: 13 hours, 19 minutes 

The Woman They Couldn’t Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, And the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

Written and narrated by Kate Moore

The author of 2017’s best-selling Radium Girls, about the female workers at a World War I radium factory who fought for safer working conditions, returned in 2021 with another absorbing account of women finding their voices. The story’s hero is Elizabeth Packard, who was committed to an insane asylum in the 1860s. But Packard, a mother of six, was far from mentally ill. Her preacher husband, Theophilus, signed her into the Illinois State Hospital to rid himself of an outspoken wife who questioned his ideas and authority (if she didn’t conform, he warned her, “I shall put you into the asylum!,” according to Moore). Once inside, Packard discovered she was not alone: She met woman after woman who’d been forcibly and needlessly incarcerated by family members or spouses to keep them quiet and out of sight. She decided to fight back against the system that made this possible (including the hospital’s cruel overseer, Andrew McFarland), and successfully challenged the laws that allowed for such gross injustice. It’s a riveting and well-researched book that reads like a suspenseful novel, narrated by the author in a brisk British accent.

Listening time: 14 hours, 36 minutes

​The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War​​​

Written and narrated by Malcolm Gladwell

This well-produced listen for World War II history buffs is a 2021 offering from Gladwell, the New Yorker writer known for his dives into pop-sociology and psychology with giant bestsellers like Blink and The Tipping Point. Here he packs every chapter with enthusiasm about his subject: the multinational group of characters involved in developing U.S. air power in the World War II era, including British physicist Frederick Lindemann and U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay — men who were obsessed with the potential of precision bombing as a way to crush American enemies with efficient force (a topic the author has also explored in his Revisionist History podcast). It was a pragmatic calculus that raised some serious ethical questions. Gladwell, who can sometimes go a little too deep into the details, weaves in archival recordings of the men involved, as well as the sounds of airplanes and bombs and dramatic background music, to help bring the history alive.

Listening time: 5 hours, 14 minutes​

This Is Your Mind on Plants​

Written and narrated by Michael Pollan

​For those expecting a book about a vegetable-based diet (Pollan is the Food Rules guy, after all!), his focus here may come as a surprise. This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021) is about three psychoactive substances found in the natural world: opium, caffeine and mescaline. The first is derived from an article he wrote 24 years ago for Harper’s, and includes his own attempts at growing poppies; the second is from a separate audiobook released in 2020 called Caffeine, where he goes cold turkey on coffee-drinking (it’s not pretty); and the last, which is new, involves his experimenting with peyote. Always an engaging narrator, Pollan dives deep into these subjects, offering cultural critiques and scientific insights that will make you think hard about why one plant is considered benign while another is criminalized. (Read AARP’s interview with Pollan for more.)

Listening time: 7 hours, 37 minutes​

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

Written and narrated by Michelle Zauner

Author Zauner, 32, the lead singer of the indie band Japanese Breakfast, has transformed her compelling 2018 essay in The New Yorker, “Crying in H-Mart,” into a best-selling 2021 memoir centered around her relationship with her late Korean mother, who’d prepare traditional dishes such as jjigae and gimbap for her family in rural Oregon, sometimes making do without access to the ingredients she needed. She communicated her love through food, which is why remembering the attention her mother lavished on her meals, Zauner sometimes breaks down crying at H Mart, a supermarket specializing in Asian food. The author, who also writes about challenges she faced growing up Korean American, describes the shock she felt at age 25 when her mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer and the lingering grief — sometimes manifesting as sudden waves of anger when seeing, for instance, an older Korean woman eating seafood noodles at a food court (“Why is she here slurping up spicy jjamppong noodles and my mom isn’t?”). It’s an engrossing personal story about a complicated bond. Don’t be surprised if it makes you cry.

Listening time: 7 hours, 23 minutes

Editor's note: This article was originally published on November 15, 2021. It has been updated to reflect new information. 

​Christina Ianzito covers scams and fraud, and is the books editor for aarp.org and AARP The Magazine. Also a longtime travel writer and editor, she received a 2020 Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation.​

Bethanne Patrick is a freelance book critic. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR Books and others.

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