New Year, New Tunes
Happy New Year! It’s 2024 and the new semester is upon us. We love our print books at the Chester Fritz Library but there’s something special about listening to a storyteller during the cold winter months…
If you’re feeling the audio love, try out our audiobook recommendations below! Book feel a bit long? The UND community has created several podcasts to keep you company throughout your day. Either way, you won’t have to step a foot out of the house to listen to these stories.
Podcasts
Hosted by The Dakota Student
The Dakota Student is the student-run newspaper publication of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Founded in 1888, the Student has been publishing (with a few name changes) for over a century since! In 2019 the paper branched into audio the Dakota Student Podcast. Tune into the student hosts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.
Hosted by Jack Weinstein
Airing since 2009, Why? Radio is a philosophical podcast hosted by UND’s own Philosophy professor, Jack Russell Weinstein. It aims to show that all philosophy is relevant to our day-to-day lives and that everyone is doing philosophy all the time, we just don’t know it. Enjoy a wide range of intellectual debates on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or iHeart Radio Podcasts.
The Chronicles of Chester Fritz
Hosted by Brian Urlacher
The Chronicles of Chester Fritz is a podcast featuring original short stories drawing on the Lovecraftian mythos. Additional commentary touches on the background of each story and explores intersections with the works of H. P. Lovecraft and other contemporary fictions writers. Follow the adventures of Chester Fritz Library professors on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.
Hosted by UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences
A health and medicine podcast from the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences. Each episode of Dakota Health explores a specific healthcare topic with UND-based faculty, students, and staff from across North Dakota. Enjoy the insights on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.
Fiction
By Rebecca Yarros
Read by Rebecca Soler and Teddy Hamilton
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. However, pressure from the commanding general (Violet’s mother) forces Violet to join the dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away … because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them. With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda–because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
By Colson Whitehead
Read by Dion Graham
To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. When Ray’s cousin, Freddie, falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa–the “Waldorf of Harlem” he volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?
By Emily Henry
Read by Julia Whelan
Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college–they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now–for reasons they’re still not discussing–they don’t. They broke up five months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends. Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week … in front of those who know you best?
By Barbara Kingsolver
Read by Charlie Thurston
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Non-Fiction
By Paul Kalanithi
Read by Sunil Malhotra and Cassandra Campbell
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all.
By Britney Spears
Read by Michelle Williams
A brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope. In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice–her truth–was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others.
By Bessel A. Van der Kolk
Read by Sean Pratt
A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing. Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat on a daily basis; one in five Americans have been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
By Bill Bryson
Read by Richard Mathews
Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science. Although he doesn’t know anything about the subject (at first), he is eager to learn, and takes information that he gets from the world’s leading experts and explains it to us in a way that makes it exciting and relevant. Even the most pointy-headed, obscure scientist succumbs to the affable Bryson’s good nature, and reveals how he or she figures things out. Showing us how scientists get from observations to ideas and theories is Bryson’s aim, and he succeeds brilliantly.
