My listening year

Audio picks for 2023

Over a thousand hours on the road.

At least 300 hours of walking on the terrace or in the park.

Roughly 60 hours of ironing.

And sundry hours cooking or cleaning.

I couldn’t have done it without the music. And the stories. And the wise words that help me make sense of the world, and at times push me to ask new questions, or think in different ways.

I’ve done less writing than I had resolved to do at the start of the year but in some ways, I have also done more. More emails to get things done, more requests forwarded through bureaucratic mazes, more reviews of emerging scholarship, more activity reports. That’s not called writing, but it does take words, and often, carefully considered ones.

But then, I have done more listening. Not just to the sounds that come in through my airpods, but to those that filter through the silences that surround me. I have taken longer pauses before speaking, and tried to make meaning of the pauses in others’ speech. Podcast aficionados will appreciate the power of the pause—something I’ve been noticing and thinking about as I listen, and I will get around to discussing that at some point.

So, what contributed to those 1360 hours (and more) of listening? If roughly one-fourth is taken by music (old favourites, new recommendations, and Spotify surprises), there’s still around a thousand hours to account for.

Here’s a very brief round-up of [some of] what’s been playing on my phone.

Audiobooks

Among the highlights of the year was Abraham Verghese’s The Convenant of Water, narrated by the author. The 31 hours of what is certainly a tome in printed form flowed smoothly, not least because of the evocative reading. Two books by Ann Patchett, one recent-ish (Commonwealth), and one brand new (Tom Lake), reminded me what it is to dissect family life with a compassionate yet unsparing eye and excavate insights that make one take a deeper look into one’s own relationships. Lauren Groff’s Matrix, read by Adjoa Andoh, was an unexpected joy to listen to and one that I would like to revisit in print—this feminist fable is loosely based on the character of medieval mystic poet Marie du France. To round off the year was the Booker shortlisted The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng and read by David Oakes and Louise Mai-Newberry—a fictionalized backstory of Somerset Maugham’s work, The Letter, set in Penang in the early 1900s.

Podcasts

The bulk of my “mike-time” is of course still spent listening to the spoken word in the form of packaged streaming audio. I realized this year that it’s hard to keep up with the new, when one also wants to keep up with the regular shows that drop weekly or sometimes more frequently. Apart from the daily news podcasts that open my queue, these are just a few that have kept me going in 2023.

Empire, of course, the runaway hit that now has over a million downloads and its own inner-circle club. Hosted by the irrepressible duo comprising historian/author William Dalrymple and journalist/author Anita Anand, the show was launched in August 2022 and has been a runaway hit. Having cycled through the British in India, the Ottoman Empire, the global history of slavery, the Russian Empire and the Persians (not quite finished), the show is, at the turn of the year, taking a brief tangent with a set of four special episodes that make up a “Christmas mini-series”. It’s hard to describe the podcast in simple terms—it is clearly a huge undertaking that rests largely on the hosts’ abilities to tell compelling, research-backed stories, while also drawing on their enviable literary and scholarly networks to bring in an enviable array of experts on the minutiae of global histories. The unflagging energy and enthusiasm of both Dalrymple and Anand as they weave through the complex dynamics of politics, culture, geography, and just plain accident, is what keeps the listener agog, not to mention the ready laughter (sometimes at the bleakest of gallows humour) and the evident chemistry that lends a spark (or two) to the show. I don’t know how they keep it up, but twice a week for over a year, without a break, is quite something.

Wiser than me, a limited series hosted by Veep and Seinfeld regular Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, celebrates older women and their wisdom. In several of her works, and most poignantly in her essay Space Crone, author Ursula le Guin has spoken of the post-menopausal—or older—woman, as the perfect repository of worldly wisdom, an apt representative of humanity when facing an alien culture. Louis-Dreyfuss engages with ten American women, starting with actor Jane Fonda, and ending with another actor, Carol Burnett, to unearth much laughter, a few tears, and many life lessons from those who are going through their “third act”. While I would not recommend listening to these at one go (the host can get a bit cloying), an episode here and there every few weeks can be enjoyable.

I edged back into true crime after a long break, having been persuaded by a review of Bear Brook, reported and produced by Jason Moon of New Hampshire Public Radio in the US. In a compelling narrative that spans more than four decades and traverses North America, Moon attempts to uncover the mystery behind four unidentified bodies in the woods of New Hampshire. What’s remarkable is the tenacity with which Moon pursues the story, going into levels of detail that reveal connections not only with these killings, but with evolving approaches to forensics and criminology.

It was also a delight to reconnect with an old favourite closer to home, City of Women, produced by Vaaka Media, which launched a new season in August this year. Their short personal essays and interview-based stories train an ear on what it means to be a woman and to navigate and experience the city.

I was introduced to Alie Ward’s show Ologies by my daughter. This is a nerdy, funny, imaginative show based on no-holds-barred conversations with people studying the things they are fascinated by, even love—from quasithanology (near-death experiences) to teratology (monsters) to gustology (taste) and more. Ward’s insatiable curiosity leads to questions big and small, mundane and outlandish, and the guests’ enthusiasm and passion for their subject of study keeps the answers interesting and intriguing. One of my favorite recent episodes, and one I would recommend for starters, is an exploration of the emotional side of abstract mathematics with Prof Eugenia Cheng.

From among the shows I [more or less] regularly listen to, here are some standout episodes:

Interstitium from RadioLab takes us on a voyage through the human body to discover a new...organ? system?

The doctors of Gaza from NYT’s The Daily is heartbreaking as it shows us what it means to deal with the injured and dying every day, with next to nothing in supplies and tools.

The life and times of Jerry Pinto, a marathon (even longer) episode from Amit Varma’s The Seen and the Unseen but Pinto is, as always, thoughtful and funny and irreverent.

Chinatown Fading from Suno India, a three-part mini-series about Calcutta’s vanishing Chinese community.

So as I set my airpods down this New Year’s Eve, I turn my ear to the sounds immediately around me: the trundling trucks, the honking cars, the screech of the motorbike tyres, but also the birdsong and the laughter of neighbours’ children, the music (right now it’s Abba’s Waterloo from one side of the house and Ranjani-Gayatri’s abhangs from another),...I am grateful for the spectrum of sound that enriches my life.

Here’s to more stories for the ear and for the mind, in 2024!