Biography audiobooks do something print rarely pulls off as well: you hear a life. Narrators, especially when the subject reads their own story, bring a texture to memory and confession that makes you feel like you’re sitting across from someone. Mary Karr’s “The liar’s club,” performed by the author, is a perfect example of how voice transforms memoir into something almost unbearably intimate.

If you love understanding what actually drives people, how ambition and luck and failure tangle together, this category will keep you hooked. Listeners who commute tend to finish biographies faster than any other genre, which tells you everything about how consuming they get. Walter Isaacson’s work on Steve Jobs, released in 2011, still sparks arguments, and that’s exactly the kind of book that rewards the audio format.