Tina Fey: Bossypants Audiobook by Tina Fey

Why the audiobook wins

Tina Fey reads her own memoir, and that single fact changes everything about it. The jokes land with the timing she wrote them for, the sarcasm has the exact deadpan she'd use in a writers' room, and bits that read as merely wry on the page come across as outright funny once you hear the pause before the punchline. It's the reason the recording swept the Audies, taking Audiobook of the Year and the Biography/Memoir award in 2012.

This is the one to queue up for a flight or a solo errand day, something you want to laugh out loud to in public without caring who notices. Fey narrates like she's telling you the story at a bar, not performing it, and that intimacy is the whole appeal of hearing a comedian's memoir instead of reading it silently.

A Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album followed the Audies, proof the Fey-reads-Fey formula wasn't a gimmick. At a brisk five and a half hours, one credit gets you the whole performance.