I’ve been listening to audiobooks regularly since 2015. These are the ones I think are especially good for their combination of interesting/useful content, great narration, and a moderate complexity level which balances high information per minute with easiness to follow. I love fiction, but fiction books don’t work for me as audiobooks (don’t know why) so everything here is nonfiction.

History

America

• What God Hath Wrought

• Battlecry of Freedom

• Freedom From Fear

• Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

• Reconstruction: A Concise History

• Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865

• Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

• Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

• The Robert Caro Books

• Albion’s Seed

China

• The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

• Maoism: A Global History

• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

• Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

• Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Europe

• The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

• The Second World War by Antony Beevor

• The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor

• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Africa

• The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence

General/other

• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

• The Arabs: A History

Animal Welfare

• Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

• Eating Animals

Politics

• The Wizard and the Prophet

• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

• The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

• The End of History and the Last Man

• The Anatomy of Fascism

• Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

Tech

• Chip War: The Quest to Dominate the World’s Most Critical Technology

• The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

• The Prize and The Quest by Yergin

Other

• The Knausgaard Books

• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t