The best short audiobooks

This music memoir is perfect for listeners who want to learn more about music and the creative process. In this Audible Original, join musician Yo-Yo Ma as he explores his life of curiosity, creativity, and personal expression through music. Ma’s narration of his own story is punctuated by exclusive musical performances. This inspiring memoir will have you believing in the power of music and art and its ability to connect human beings to one another in a meaningful way.

Wanting to learn more about the civil rights movement and racial injustice in America? Then James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time is essential listening. In these essays, author and activist James Baldwin looks at the role of race in American history. Although written more than 50 years ago, Baldwin's words still resonate. Accomplished actor and narrator Jesse L. Martin performs Baldwin's powerful words with the passion and expressiveness that these important essays deserve.

Seeking a short audiobook to help you reframe your way of seeing the world and yourself? Pick up The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. This book focuses on changing the ingrained self-limiting beliefs that ultimately rob us of fulfillment and joy. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offers up a new code of conduct that can free your mind to seek out happiness and love. This audiobook is exclusively available from Audible, and is narrated by Peter Coyote, who also narrates Ruiz's follow-up, The Fifth Agreement.

Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me was hailed by Toni Morrison as required reading, and this book has a lot to teach the listener about America's history and current crisis with racism. Written as a letter to his adolescent son, Coates reflects on what it means to be Black in America and how to reckon with our country's fraught history with matters of race. This narrative gets personal, so it makes sense that Coates himself narrates his own work. His deep connection to and conviction in his words makes Between the World and Me engaging and heart-wrenching as well as powerfully educational.

How can we be our own person, our authentic self, and still feel like we belong within our community and our culture? This is the big question Brené Brown attempts to answer in Braving the Wilderness. Here, Brown argues that true belonging can only come when we decide to live as our truest self and have found a path to self-acceptance. But how do we get there? In less than five hours, this short audiobook will explain that too. In a world obsessed with perfection and people-pleasing, finding our way back to our truest self is easier said than done. But Braving the Wilderness wants to help you get there. Brown narrates her own book with a candidness and honesty that drives home her message.

In less than five hours, Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning has so much to teach its listeners. From the beginning chapters where Frankl details his years inside Nazi Death Camps to the later chapters where the author explains logotherapy, his revolutionary approach to psychotherapy, this book gets to the core of what drives humanity. Frankl argues that mankind's primary driving force is our search for meaning. This audiobook is read by multiple Audie Award-winning narrator Simon Vance.

If you've ever struggled to learn something new or fit in or stand out (in a good way), let David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day offer up some hope. Sedaris has struggled with these very challenges throughout his life. As a third grader, he went to a speech therapist to change his voice. He also tried to take guitar lessons. When he moved to France, he attempted to learn the language by taking a class. While his attempts often don't go much of anywhere, Sedaris has the wonderful ability to laugh at his own failures, and that laughter is infectious. Listen to this humorous essay collection the next time you're being hard on yourself, and maybe you'll start laughing at yourself too (in a good way). Oh, and the audiobook is read by the author—because who better to laugh at David Sedaris's misfortunes than, well, David Sedaris?

Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X is an excellent way to learn about slam poetry through a fictional story written in verse. When Xiomara Batista feels unheard in her Harlem neighborhood, she decides to turn to poetry to express her feelings. She pours all of her thoughts and emotions onto the pages of her notebook, and she assumes these are words she will always have to keep to herself. That is, until she joins her school's slam poetry club. No longer content with staying silent, now all Xiomara can think about is performing her words. This acclaimed audiobook is narrated by the author, in an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning performance.

George M. Johnson's young adult memoir All Boys Aren't Blue is a powerful, reassuring listen for young people looking for guidance as they come to terms with their own sexuality and gender identity. But it's also a great short audiobook for older listeners who want to reflect on their own coming out journey, or those who want to better understand and empathize with others. In short, this audiobook truly has something to teach everyone who listens to it. In this quick but emotional listen, the author, a prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist, narrates his own journey as a young queer man of color while touching on a wide range of topics—gender identity, brotherhood, Black joy, family, and more.

Are you looking for ways to build good habits and break bad ones? James Clear has the answers in his audiobook, Atomic Habits. It doesn't matter what your goals are—Clear's framework is effective for whatever you're striving to accomplish. The first thing to recognize, as he stresses, is that bad habits don't come from being a flawed person; they come from having a flawed system. So, to break bad habits and start developing good ones, you have to reconstruct your system. This easy-to-follow guide offers practical advice and simple steps you can apply right away, all in under six hours. Clear peppers his self-narrated audiobook with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used small habits to master their craft and change their life.