The 20 Best Audiobooks To Fall Asleep To

From kid-friendly fairytales to classic stories from your favorite 19th- and 20th-century authors, Bedtime Stories for Stressed-Out Adults offers bite-sized fiction perfect for readers who crave novels, but don’t want to miss out on key plot details while they’re snoozing.

One of 2021’s most acclaimed poetry collections, Jasmine Mans’ Black Girl, Call Home is a coming-of-age novel-in-verse that examines the experiences of young, queer, Black women in the United States.

Celebrate NASA’s release of audio from a black hole, with Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, a book that chronicles a half-century of astronomical pursuits — specifically, the 50 long years spent trying to record the sound of gravitational waves.

Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award, Camonghne Felix’s Build Yourself a Boat centers Black womanhood, examining what life was like for Black women during Trump’s presidency.

In this insightful collection of scientific ephemera, physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein offers readers a quick and dirty primer on particle physics, discrimination in the hard sciences, how melanin works, and how Star Trek can inform our personal politics today.

From Octavia’s Brood co-editor adrienne maree brown comes this self-help book that draws inspiration from the works of sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler. Like any good self-help book, Emergent Strategy offers strategies for personal improvement, but brown also provides readers with a toolkit for improving their communities and the world at large.

If you’re the kind of person who finds themselves worrying about how the world might end — whether someday far, far into the future or in your own lifetime — you owe it to yourself to pick up Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), which examines five potential avenues for the universe’s annihilation.

J. Drew Lanham pulls at threads of his family history in The Home Place, tracing the lives of the Lanhams of Edgefield, South Carolina, with careful consideration for his own childhood, when he discovered his love of nature.

What would happen if you found yourself trapped in a different time, without the modern conveniences that make your life, well, modern? In How to Invent Everything, Ryan North teaches readers how their most precious technologies came to be — and how they could reinvent them if the need were ever to arise.

Voted one of 2020’s best books by NPR, The Economist, Newsweek, and others, Jo Marchant’s The Human Cosmos traces 20 millennia of human history, paying particular attention to humanity’s relationship to the heavenly bodies, and how that relationship has shaped society as a whole.

How do we remember the things we have collectively lost? Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses takes a long, poignant look at how we remember — and eulogize — the things we’re forced to leave behind, from works of art to animals, places, and other things lost to time.

The world lost a titan of acting when Cicely Tyson passed away in 2021 at the age of 96. Her bestselling memoir, published just two days before her death, retraces her long and lauded life, from her experiences growing up in East Harlem as the child of West Indian immigrants, to her breakout roles in Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, to her lifelong spiritual journey.

It’s never too late to learn how to make the right decision. In The Optimist’s Telescope, Obama administration senior advisor Bina Venkataraman breaks down neuroscience to explain why we make poor decisions, and offers readers easy-to-use strategies for making better choices.

Jazz is truly an American art form — and perhaps the most influential one our country’s ever produced. In Playing Changes, Jazz critic Nate Chinen revisits the musicians and movements that shaped the sounds we appreciate today, both in America and around the world.

In three eulogies — for the victims of 9/11, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin — Toni Morrison reflects on diversity and difference, African American influences on mainstream culture, and the power of her literary legacy.

When we talk about our relationship to nature, what comes to mind for you? Is it forest bathing and grounding? Gardening and houseplants-as-decor? What about mind-altering drugs? In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan examines humanity’s often-fraught relationship with plant-made compounds like opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Lauret Savoy’s Trace is a touching and eye-opening examination of the people of North America: indigenous tribes, white colonizers, enslaved Africans, Ellis Island immigrants, and the inheritors of those myriad legacies.

Exacting and insightful, Bahar Orang’s Where Things Touch attempts to catalog how people experience beauty. What determines what’s considered beautiful, and how do those concepts of beauty translate to the Other — the queer, the medicalized, the old, and the young?

Humans swim for pleasure and exercise, and — less often in the modern world — for travel and survival. There’s little doubt that swimming is a near-universal experience, yet people’s reasons for swimming are as unique as they are. Bonnie Tsui explores the history of this relaxing — and often dangerous — activity in Why We Swim.

No one can say we aren’t living in difficult times. Income inequality, human rights abuses, climate change, and Covid-19 compound the emotional impact of common tragedies, such as lost jobs and the deaths of loved ones. In Wintering, Katherine May offers readers strategies for recovering from trauma by willingly withdrawing from public life.