There’s something really intimate about finding out your friends’ book (and audiobook) preferences. Are they into thrillers? Murder mysteries? Romance? When it comes to Taylor Swift, her favorite audiobooks are a mix of all three. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Dec. 10, Swift revealed the “elements” that make up her favorite audiobooks, which she listens to “constantly.”
During the interview, Colbert asked Swift how she would wind down from a show on The Eras Tour. Swift mentioned immediately heading back to the hotel and having “mermaid time” — aka taking a bath — and getting room service. After that, Swift said she’d sign CDs to do a “tactile hand activity” (similar to baking her sourdough, which became a major part of her personality after finishing the tour).
Swift also said, “I’ll put on my Dateline,” which prompted Colbert to ask, “Do you do audiobooks?” Swift immediately lit up, and launched into the elements that make up the perfect audiobook for her. “You know all the elements of, like, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca? That book? So if you’ve got an old, rambling, shambles, old British mansion covered in moss or ivy, and there’s a mysterious relationship and he may not be what he seems,” she said. “And there’s a murder that has happened in the past, but you hear whispers of it. There’s the idea of a ghost, or an actual ghost. If you present me with a plot line where there’s a family compound on an island off the coast of Maine. There’s secrets in this family. Right? This brother, what’s going on with him? Why don’t I know where he’s been for 10 years? Why did he just show up? Do you know what I mean?”
That’s not all. “If there’s a marriage and the marriage isn’t what it seems, and it seems like this dude is like, clearly, why are you with him? He’s horrible to you! Oh, plot twist: unreliable narrator. She’s the psycho,” she said. “If you’ve got any of that, I’m gonna need to read that. And when I say read that, I’m gonna need someone to read that to me.”
If you’re into these same “elements” Swift described, then let me give you some recommendations as a rookie-intermediate book lover. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is a classic (plus, there’s the movie version starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike that you can watch on HBO Max), and The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine will give you those marriage-isn’t-what-it-seems, plot-twist vibes. (It’s also being adapted into a movie starring Jennifer Lopez, coming to Netflix in the next year or so.)
If that’s not enough, let’s hope that someone rolls all these elements and mashes them into one single book. As our resident English teacher, maybe it’ll be Swift herself.