Popular Audiobooks with Capitol Settings

My recent family vacation to Washington DC was amazing. We visited the Capitol building, the monuments, and several of the Smithsonian museums.

I was in awe of the setting… which made me wonder. There must be tons of audiobooks that take place in Washington or are written about the area. My search yielded some interesting results.

Fiction

The King of Torts by John Grisham and narrated by Michael Beck was the first book coughed up by Audible’s search engine in response to “Washington DC” in the search box. The 2003 bestseller is a typical Grisham legal thriller involving a public defender who ends up in the middle of an enormous case involving a pharmaceutical giant.

I remember reading this one. It was fine, but not anything new or surprising… which isn’t a good thing for a thriller. But if you are looking for a standard legal thriller, this will certainly kill time on a summer day at the beach.

Another result from my search is George Pelecanos’ Hard Revolution, narrated by Lance Reddick. A crime novel about a rookie cop takes a hard turn when he lured into the world of violence. I have never read Pelecanos, but fans say he’s awesome. Maybe I should add him to my list of authors that I want to read…

Nonfiction

I was hoping to find some nonfiction works, so I eliminated the “DC” from my search terms. I came up with the obvious books about war and oil and had to scroll awhile before I hit some history.

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek and narrated by Rick Adamson is more like what I was looking for. We visited Mount Vernon and it was very interesting.

This book talks about Washington and that he owned slaves and basically treated them like any other slave owner of the time. When he commanded troops both black and white during the Revolutionary War, he began to see that slavery was wrong. At Mount Vernon, I learned that he freed his slaves in his will…

The Lincoln memorial was an impressive sight and a fitting dedication to a man who was a political genius

Skipping over the books on politics, I searched for Lincoln… and came up with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Not quite what I was seeking, so I scrolled down to Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin and narrated by Richard Thomas. The Lincoln memorial was an impressive sight and a fitting dedication to a man who was a political genius. His ability to relate to “everyman” was clearly one of his strengths.

If you’ve never visited Washington DC, I highly recommend it! If you can’t visit, at least read about it!

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