Peter Korn Audiobooks

Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: a quiet meditation on craft

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

434 listener ratings

Who is Peter Korn?

A book about making, rather than a manual for it: Why We Make Things and Why It Matters asks the question most craft writing steps around, which is what the work does to the person doing it. Filed on our shelves under home and garden, it reads a great deal closer to reflection than to instruction.

The subject is the satisfaction of shaping material by hand, and the harder matter underneath it: why that satisfaction feels like meaning, and what it says about a life arranged around it. Peter Korn writes in an unhurried, undecorated way, closer in spirit to an essay than a memoir, and the book has kept an audience for over a decade for exactly that reason.

Peter Korn in audiobooks

Under six hours, read by Traber Burns, whose deliberate, weathered delivery matches a text that wants to be considered rather than consumed.

Several hundred listeners have rated it, and the score has held steady above four stars across the years, a fair indication of how well the argument travels beyond the workshop. Take it slowly, ideally while your hands are busy with something of your own. The audiobook is listed below.