Audiobook Review – The Audiobook of the Year 2019

From Goodreads:

The Book of the Year is back, with yet another pro-rogues gallery of the most amazing, audacious and absolutely absurd news of 2019.

Once again the fact-finding foursome behind the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish have been newspaper-trawling and website-crawling to create your ultimate guide to the past twelve months.

Learn which of Donald Trump’s claims are so bizarre they can’t even be fact-checked. Find out why every single French MP received camembert in the post. And get to the bottom of all the improvements made to the Ford company’s robotic bum. All this and much, much more, including the news that:

· Two tourists planning to visit the Norwegian village of Å, ended up 1,310km away, in Aa. · Five guys were arrested at a branch of Five Guys. · Hollyoaks was partly written by the British government. · The US town of Hell froze over.

From Assange to Zuckerberg, taking in Cardi B, CCTV, D-Day, and eSports, The Book of the Year is the only book you need to make senseof the year, no matter how senseless it might have seemed.

It’s a first for me. I am solely reviewing the Audiobook. Usually, if I do have an audiobook I will switch between listening and reading a physical/ebook copy, but I prefer listening to this instead of reading it. I am a huge fan of the podcast No Such Thing as A Fish, of the TV show QI and of the Radio 4 programme Museum of Curiosity, all of which the creators of this audiobook work on. This audiobook is like having an 11 hour version of one of the NSTAAF podcasts and its excellent.

I really liked the inclusion of some of the live shows and the fact that they don’t edit out the inside jokes, pronunciation errors or banter between the narrators. I imagine it is probably a lot more fun to listen to this than to read the physical book for those reasons. The bleeping out of ”Brexit” was particularly funny and welcome. You just seem to get a lot more content with the Audiobook that just the researched facts about the year. In fact this audiobook contains a bonus chapter of news that appeared after the book went to print! Also we get the personalities of Anna, Andrew, Dan and James which would be lost within the print version.

It’s also one of those books you can listen to in little bursts without loosing your place. It’s great for filling in little bits of time, walking to the shops, waiting on a train etc etc. As it is organised alphabetically you can listen to each letter independently. Though I would suggest listening to them in order as there are recurring joke.

For me its just an enjoyable listen that also educates on some of the weirder points of the year. It was a reminder that the news wasn’t all doom and gloom and that there was some great, wild and interesting stuff happening that would have passed me by otherwise. Even if you have never listened to an Episode of NSTAAF this would be a great place to start!