Thanks to Brand Nubian’s Lord Jamar, the #bookphonechallenge is a thing… a very welcomed thing in 2017. While I spent hours committing random facts to memory from World Book Encyclopedia, truth be told, I didn’t read enough books for pleasure growing up. Outside of Outbreak and The Coming Plague, I read The Source and XXL, before transitioning to an assortment of websites to feed my information addiction. Most of the books I read were dry, meaningless, and assigned reading for school. Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights did little to stoke my intellectual curiosity as a young, Black, adolescent growing up in New York City.

As an adult, the critical need to consume books has never been more apparent. I regret not realizing sooner the importance of feeding my brain’s insatiable desire to be challenged by new ideas. Growing is impossible without exposure to alternate perspectives from which to gain insight.

While I still find it difficult to sit down somewhere quiet, nerd out, and thumb through the pages of a book, (unless I’m on a plane trying to justify my need to utilize both armrests), the good news is audiobooks are dope. Let’s be real, after a day of concentrating efforts on income generation and trying to prevent your five-year-old from bungee jumping off the refrigerator, our eyes are tired. Audiobooks remind us we live in the future and other people can read us the information we don’t have time to read at our own convenience. In a city like Houston where every drive you make is a minimum of thirty minutes, there’s plenty of time to feed your grey matter. Admit it, the radio plays the same ish for six months at a time and you’re sick of it anyway… Might as well learn you something instead. The wisdom I’ve accumulated in the past eleven months can mostly be attributed to an assortment of books I’d love to share with you. In order from least to most recent here they go: