Carla Hall Reveals the Books She Loves to Listen to Before Bed—and Why She Prefers Long Sagas
The chef shares her audiobook routine, favorite genres and the one thing that can make her skip a book
Key Takeaways
- Carla Hall loves audiobooks and listens to at least 15 minutes every night before bed.
- She prefers long, immersive stories so she can stay with one book for hours.
- Hall has embraced romance as an adult and always samples a narrator before listening.
This week’s cover star, Carla Hall, is best known as a chef and TV personality, but the former Top Chef star and The Chew co-host is also an avid reader—and the nightly ritual she swears by to drift off to sleep is one you may want to borrow. Every night, Carla settles in with an audiobook for at least 15 minutes before sleep. It’s a habit rooted in her childhood love of reading, and it’s become a nonnegotiable part of how she winds down.
“Audiobooks. I love to be read to at night,” she said during this week’s cover interview. “I was a big reader when I was a kid. And so for me, every night for at least 15 minutes, I put on a book and I’m ready to go to sleep.”
Watch Carla Hall’s cover interview here!
Why she picks sagas—the longer, the better
Carla doesn’t just dabble. She burns through books, which is why she has a very specific strategy when picking her next listen: go long.
“I get books that are like sagas because I’m like, give me 30 hours if I can because I don’t want to have to pick another one because I go through a lot,” she said.
Harry Potter is one of her go-tos—a series so beloved by audiobook listeners that it’s become a kind of gold standard for what a great narrated book can be.
Her take on romance books
Carla recently discovered a genre she never explored before: romance. And she went there wholeheartedly. “I’m going to out myself again because for a while—I’m not in this space now—for a while I wanted spicy novels. I would call them spicy,” she said.
“I never read romance when I was a kid,,” she said. “I didn’t get into that, but now as an adult I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And then I like romance and sometimes I like spicy.”
The one thing that can make her skip a book
For Carla (and so many readers), the narrator matters just as much as the story. Maybe more, so she won’t commit to a book without sampling the narrator’s voice first. If the voice doesn’t land for her, she passes—no matter how good the book is supposed to be.
It’s actually great advice for anyone new to audiobooks. Most major audiobook services let you listen to a short preview before you buy or borrow. Those few minutes can save you hours of listening to a voice that grates on you or, worse, one that puts you to sleep in a bad way—the kind where you keep missing the plot.
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