5 Reese's Book Club Picks That Are Great On Audio

"I want people to stop saying 'I didn't really read it, I just listened,'" Reese Witherspoon once urged her Instagram followers. "Stop that. If you listened, you read it ... There's no right way to absorb a book." In an age when attention is fractured and multitasking is a survival strategy, it's a sentiment that feels particularly relevant.

Audiobooks have steadily become a dominant form of reading for many. In fact, according to Publishing Perspectives, US digital audio sales rose by 26.1% in the first ten months of 2024 alone, generating a staggering $883.4 million in revenue. And while Audible might dominate the conversation, it's far from the only option. Smaller platforms like Kobo, Scribd, and even public library apps like Libby are helping reshape how we access stories more ethically.

Reese's Book Club, which began as a reading list, has since evolved into a broader listening list, too. Now that she's partnered with Apple Books, Witherspoon's selections are seemingly curated as much for their emotional texture as for how well they travel by sound. For these picks, what they manage to achieve on the page, they echo — sometimes more intimately — in audio. And they're all the better for it.

"Daisy Jones & The Six" is a novel about a band that never existed, told in the form of interviews that were never conducted — and yet, in audio, it feels uncannily real. Something about hearing the voices, the pauses, and the breathy tension gives the illusion of having stumbled upon a long-lost rock documentary rather than a work of fiction.

Set against the bleary, sun-bleached glamour of 1970s Los Angeles, it reconstructs the rise and fall of a Fleetwood Mac-adjacent rock group through a patchwork of recollections, contradictions, and carefully withheld truths. The print version is compelling; the audiobook is immersive. With a full cast of 21 performers (including Jennifer Beals, Judy Greer, and Pablo Schreiber), it captures both the drama behind the music and the seductive haze of myth-making itself.

One listener on Reddit called it "probably the best audiobook I've listened to." Another wrote, "I just can't imagine reading the book in print knowing how awesome it sounded in audiobook form." It felt, they said, "more like a movie than a book" (which may help explain why it's one of the picks from Reese's Book Club that made it to the screen). The enthusiasm isn't misplaced. If any title in the Reeseverse makes the case for listening as reading, it's this one.

Kristin Hannah's "The Nightingale" has the rare distinction of being both a critical favorite and a runaway success. It's the highest-rated Reese's Book Club pick of all time on Goodreads, with an astonishing 4.64 stars from over 1.7 million readers — and, on Audible, it's even more beloved: a near-perfect 4.8 from more than 4,300 listeners.

The novel takes us on the diverging paths of sisters Vianne and Isabelle; one is a mother trying to survive and protect her daughter at home, and the other is a young woman determined to fight back by joining the Resistance under the codename "Nightingale."

Hannah was inspired by real-life accounts of women who risked everything to defy the regime. That historical weight, paired with the novel's intimate focus on sisterhood, is part of what earned the novel its enduring resonance. "The audiobook narrator is so talented at bringing each character to life," one Audible reviewer wrote. "I just could not wait to hear more and more and more of this tale," gushed another.

For a debut novel with such an unassuming protagonist, "Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine" has amassed an extraordinary following — over 18,000 ratings on Audible alone, and a stellar score of 4.7. It was Reese's first book club pick, and remains one of her most enduring.

Eleanor lives alone, speaks to no one, and keeps to a strict, airtight routine: office work, supermarket ready meals, weekend vodka, and silence. Emotionally removed and socially misaligned, she moves through the world as if she's out of sync with it. But when a well-meaning IT colleague enters her life and disrupts her isolation, the novel blooms into a laugh-out-loud ode to friendship in its most unlikely form.

The audiobook makes all of this feel warmer, thanks in no small part to the tone brought by voice actor Cathleen McCarron. As one BookBeat listener put it, "I've wanted to read this for a long time but decided to listen instead. It's only my second [audiobook], and the narration was fantastic, really bringing to life the book and its characters." It's no surprise, then, that it currently ranks among BookBeat's Top 100 audiobooks of all time.

Brené Brown has built a career out of charting the emotional terrain most of us struggle to cope with: vulnerability, trust, shame, love. Her work has always straddled the line between academic rigor and emotional fluency. A research professor by trade, she has become something closer to a public ethicist — a voice for those trying to navigate modern life. In "Braving the Wilderness," she turns her attention outward, to a deeper, more collective wound: the slow erosion of connection in contemporary culture.

The wilderness, in Brown's telling, is both a metaphor and a map: "an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching ... as dangerous as it is breathtaking." This book argues that real belonging doesn't come from fitting in or agreeing with everyone around us, but from staying grounded in our values. Even if that means being the only one in the room, Brown teaches us how to brave it.

She narrates the audiobook herself, with the conviction that makes her TED talks go viral. At times, it feels like the best pep talk you've ever heard. One keen listener on Audible considered the experience life-altering, saying Brown "speaks to the best in us and skillfully managed at the same time to challenge the worst in us," before concluding that the end result is "clearly defined guidance for being the best you can be."

Before it was a box office hit with Daisy Edgar-Jones in windswept silhouettes, "Where the Crawdads Sing" was already a novel that people were pressing urgently into one another's hands. Delia Owens's debut took on a life of its own, and in audiobook form, it soared. With nearly 300,000 Audible ratings and a glowing 4.8 average, it's the most listened-to Reese's Book Club pick of all time.

Kya Clark, the so-called "Marsh Girl," was raised in isolation after being abandoned by her family. Alone in the North Carolina wetlands, she found solace in nature, taught herself to survive, and tried to look after her young brother. When a local golden boy turns up dead, circumstances lead Kya to become the obvious suspect. But nothing, here, is quite as it seems.

Owens's reverence for the natural world infuses every chapter. One Audible listener described the experience as "intensely atmospheric — the landscape, wildlife, sounds, and even the food of the marsh came vividly to life." Another credited Cassandra Campbell's narration with shaping their entire impression: "This book was slow yet beautiful. And I think I enjoyed it a lot because of the reader. She has done an excellent job reading it."

With dozens of Reese's Book Club picks to choose from since it launched in 2017, narrowing this list was no small task. We started with the data: Audible and BookBeat ratings provide the baseline, focusing on titles that balanced both high scores and high listener volume. A 4.7-star average across thousands of reviews says something more than a 4.8 from a handful.

But numbers weren't the whole story; we also looked at format. In other words, we looked at which books gained something from being converted to audio. Listener reviews were combed for patterns in their stars and their comments. The final selections offer a mix of narrative drive, tonal texture, and literary merit.