4 extremely funny audiobooks

With mud, rain, taxes, and chilly nights, the spring can sometimes be quite cruel. So let’s have a laugh. All titles were downloaded from www.audible.com.

4. "You Can Date Boys When You're Forty," by Dave Barry

You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About, by Dave Barry
(Read by the author; Penguin Audio; 13 hours and 22 minutes)

Barry is not a polished narrator and his voice is not the most pleasing, but his timing is well-honed and an easy, conversational style helps to deliver the humor in one of his best audiobooks in years.

Though he can be annoyingly vulgar at times, his travelogue of a family trip to Israel is bittersweet and rather touching.  Best of all is Barry’s critique of “Fifty Shades of Gray,” which is so funny this critic almost fell off her exercise bike from laughing so hard.

An entertaining listen, Barry's book provides observations on everything from parenting to contemporary culture, how to become a best-selling author, funeral planning, and relationships. 

Grade: B Plus

4 of 4

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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