BenC's Audiobooks

This enchanting audio extract reunites readers with the Snowman and introduces them to a new best friend, the Snowdog. Read by Benedict Cumberbatch, star of The Hobbit and the TV series Sherlock.

The Snowman and the Snowdog: Extract read by Benedict Cumberbatch

"My book, READING WITH PATRICK, is about a student of mine named Patrick, and this remarkable literary and intellectual awakening we experienced together in a county jail in Arkansas. He was a student in my class who was incredibly bright, really quiet, and just had trouble coming to school. I really encouraged him to come to school to write and to read and we had this incredible year together where he improved incredibly. Three years after this, I’ve left Arkansas—it’s a place where a lot of people leave—I agonize about it, I decide to go to law school. My parents are like, “what the heck are you doing in Arkansas?” Three years later, I’m in law school and I find out from a friend that Patrick had gotten into a fight and killed someone. I was totally devastated. I was shocked. I went back to Arkansas to visit him in county jail and I discovered that his reading skills had regressed. They were worse when I first met him in the eighth grade, and it’s because he had dropped out of school the year after I left the Delta. The heart of the book is really about us reading together in jail for seven months while we’re waiting for his trial, and about the incredible agility and the power of reading together and writing together. And it’s also about me grappling with my own failures and trying to think about the legacy of racism and poverty in the Mississippi Delta."

S2 E62: Michelle Kuo, Author of Reading with Patrick

"What inspired me to write MEDITATE WITH ME: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Journey was I wanted kids to have a way to slow down. I wanted to give kids a beloved book that they could connect to, that they could interact with, practices that were easy for them, a way to feel their breath in their body, a way to slow down when they need it, and a way to really calm themselves…a way to sort of start practicing self-soothing techniques that they’ll really need throughout their entire lives."

S2 E63: Mariam Gates, Author of Meditate With Me

"I was inspired to write this book, UNLEASHING THE INNOVATORS, because I love big companies, I worked in one for 25 years, and in my consulting practice, company after company I meet is struggling with culture change, and revitalization, and growth, and energy, and risk and dealing with fear of failure. And many of them were using startups to try to kind of put new energy into the company. And yet, I didn’t think there was a playbook for that."

S2 E65: Jim Stengel, Author of Unleashing the Innovators

"My book THE FOUR TENDENCIES is about a personality framework that I’ve identified called the Four Tendencies that divides all of humanity into four types: Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel. I got my first insight into this framework when I had lunch with a friend and she said something that got me obsessed with this question of personality types. She said, 'I know I would be happier if I would go running, and when I was in high school I was on the track team and I never missed track practice, so why can’t I go running now?' And I thought, 'Well, why? It’s the same person, the same behavior, at that time it was effortless but now she can’t do it. What’s going on?' My determination to figure out the answer to that question, in the end, led me to write a whole book, called THE FOUR TENDENCIES."

S2 E66: Gretchen Rubin, Author of The Four Tendencies

"I think that I realized there were a lot of stories and ideas that didn’t really make sense to talk about on stage in a stand-up context because they were just too embarrassing, or not funny enough, or just too personal, and I couldn’t figure out a way to perform them live. And so I started writing them down and they just sat in this document, and I just hoped one day I’d get brave enough to do it or smart enough to figure out how to do them on stage, and I just couldn’t. People kept suggesting I write a book and I always just felt like, 'Oh God, that’s something you do when you have a long life.' I just didn’t feel like I had enough to offer, and then I thought, “Oh, maybe I should do all those stories that I've never figured out how to tell on stage. Maybe they’re a book.' And I started looking at them and I was like, “Wow this stuff’s embarrassing, I’m never gonna be able to say this in front of people.' So I just gave up on that ever happening and I started turning it into a book.  And then to get through it I had to get an intention together, I had to get a mantra together and I was like, 'Okay, I’m gonna write the book that I wish had been available to me when I was 18. I wanna write a bible for people who want to grow and feel better about their awful choices.'"

S2 E70: Whitney Cummings, Author of I'm Fine...and Other Lies

"My book, SO MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU: Letters to My Little Sister, is a collection of essays and lessons that I’ve learned over the past decade since her suicide in 2007."

S2 E72: Anna Akana, Author of So Much I Want to Tell You

"I had been working in the single-mom space through my blog and podcast, and speaking and media engagements, for more than five years. I was raised by a single mom, I became a single mom, and I had a lot of initial shame around being a single mom. And, you know what? It happens to suit me really well. And I found myself relaxing into this time that I’m in and finding all these women—there’s ten million single moms in our country, millions worldwide, and these women have nothing to be ashamed about. I’m meeting incredible women every day that are doing incredible things—in business, in their communities, with their families—and I wanted to reach out to them. And I wanted to inspire the women that aren’t quite there yet."

S2 E75: Emma Johnson, Author of The Kickass Single Mom

"I wrote this book, AN AMERICAN FAMILY, to tell the story of my family’s immigration to the United States. But behind all this, the American values that inspired me to decide to come to the United States and then make it a home."

S2 E76: Khizr Khan, Author of American Family

"PLAYING WITH FIRE is set in the 1968 presidential campaign, but the book is about nothing less than life and death, because that's what was at stake in the 1968 presidential campaign."

S2 E78: Lawrence O'Donnell, Author of Playing With Fire

"In this New Year, you might want to try meditation. Some of you may have wondered about the benefits, stress reduction, lowering of anxiety, helping you cope more efficiently, be less frustrated, less addicted in your behavior. The most important thing from the beginning is not to turn it into another self-improvement project. Meditation can be useful if you don’t expect too much from it. So let me guide you a little bit into the way I think about it."

S3 E01: Mark Epstein, Author of Advice Not Given

Benedict Cumberbatch (Casanova) 1/5

The bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics takes us on an enchanting, consoling journey to discover the meaning of time. Read by Benedict Cumberbatch.

'We are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come.'

Time is a mystery that does not cease to puzzle us. Philosophers, artists and poets have long explored its meaning while scientists have found that its structure is different from the simple intuition we have of it. From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Time flows at a different speed in different places, the past and the future differ far less than we might think, and the very notion of the present evaporates in the vast universe.

With his extraordinary charm and sense of wonder, bringing together science, philosophy and art, Carlo Rovelli unravels this mystery. Enlightening and consoling, The Order of Time shows that to understand ourselves we need to reflect on time -- and to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

The Order Of Time by Carlo Rovelli, read by Benedict Cumberbatch

This is an excerpt from the audiobook "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli, read for you by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Learn more here: https://bit.ly/2Hpl11w

From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, a concise, elegant exploration of time.

Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike.

For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe.

Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.

"A dizzying, poetic work." --The Guardian

Introduced by Peter Donaldson, Recorded by Adam Low, Martin Rosenbaum & Edit Store, Edited and Mixed at dBs Music'I have written a blasphemous book', said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, 'and I feel as spotless as the lamb'. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible - and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child - or perhaps its immaculate conception - the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville's magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online, one new chapter each day, in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.Starting 16 September 2012!For more info please go to: www.mobydickbigread.com

Chapter 58: Brit - Read by Benedict Cumberbatch - http://mobydickbigread.com

Penguin Random House Audio is the market leader for adult and children's audiobook publishing. Follow us on Twitter @PRHAudio.

The Order Of Time by Carlo Rovelli, read by Benedict Cumberbatch

PRH Audio

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