Randall Munroe Audiobooks

How To: absurd scientific advice for problems no one should solve this way

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

7 listener ratings

Who is Randall Munroe?

Every so often a physicist escapes into comedy and takes the equations with him. Randall Munroe, born in 1984, worked as a roboticist on NASA contracts before the stick-figure webcomic he drew for fun outgrew the day job. He has made xkcd full time since late 2006, and it has become the closest thing the internet has to a house style for scientific wit.

The books grew out of the comic’s most popular feature, in which readers sent in ridiculous questions and Munroe answered them properly. What If? did the maths on hypotheticals nobody had any business calculating. Thing Explainer described complicated machinery using only the thousand commonest English words. How To inverted the whole idea and offered terrible advice worked out with immaculate rigour.

The joke is always the same and it never gets old. Take an absurd premise entirely seriously, follow the physics wherever it leads, and let the reader notice only afterwards how much they have learned along the way.

Randall Munroe in audiobooks

Munroe reaches our shelves with How To, his manual of absurd scientific advice for entirely ordinary problems: moving house, crossing a river, being on time. Every solution is wrong in the practical sense and impeccable in the physical one.

Wil Wheaton narrates, and this is one of those cases where the reader is doing real work. Munroe’s humour lives in the deadpan gap between a ridiculous premise and a perfectly straight calculation, and Wheaton holds that line for six hours without once winking at the audience. Listeners here have rated it highly.

At a shade over six hours it makes an easy first Munroe, and it travels well: dip in, come out with a fact you will repeat over dinner. Explore the audiobooks below to get started.