Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe, by Brian Cox (author), Jeff Forshaw (author, narrator)

HarperAudio, ISBN 9780062936721, March 2023

In this book, read by Jeff Forshaw, Forshaw and Brian Cox discuss black holes, and how they affect every part of our universe, and indeed are key to understanding the physics and history of our universe.

Black holes are famously where general relativity and quantum physics meet but can't be made to work together. Is relativity wrong? is quantum physics wrong? So far, they each enable serious discoveries in their fields. They don't seem to be wrong. We most likely are just missing something important.

A Brief History of Black Holes: And Why Nearly Everything You Know About Them is Wrong, by Becky Smethurst (author, narrator)

Macmillan, September 2022

Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicist with a great love of black holes, and a desire to share her enthusiasm for them with the rest of us.

She tries to cover, concisely but with absorbing detail, everything important about them, starting with the important facts that they're not black, and they're not holes. They're not black because an active black hole has an accretion disk which generates a great deal of light and other radiation. They're not holes, because that absolute darkness inside the accretion disk isn't a void. It's an immensely dense accumulation of matter, usually many, many times the mass of a star--certainly our star. Smethurst compares  black holes to mountains, which I find not personally satisfying, but entirely reasonable.