“Official Book Club Selection, A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin,” read by Griffin. Abridged, 6½ hours. Random House Audio, $32.

Griffin’s cheeky comedy, making foul-mouthed fun of herself and all things Hollywood, has been a staple for years of her Emmy-winning HBO series, “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.”

Now she brings that saucy wit to the book world in a memoir that tells all the stories most people would never tell on themselves. All about her plastic surgery, for instance, and the ex-husband who stole thousands of dollars from her, and how she’s had sex most un-choosily with legions of men in awkward places.

She talks about who has a sense of humor about himself (Jerry Seinfeld leads the way) and who doesn’t (lots and lots of people). She names names on all sorts of subjects. And she does it all in a rapid-fire patter that’s just about irresistible. That’s right: even if you’re not a Griffin fan, you’re likely to find yourself laughing out loud.

It’s Griffin’s reading, in fact, that makes this audio book so terrific. I don’t know how all this would go over in print, but hearing Kathy Griffin tell it, with comic timing honed in dives from coast to coast, is a treat.

“The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich, read by Mike Chamberlain. Unabridged, 7½ hours. Random House Audio, $35.

The story of the founding of Facebook is fascinating stuff. You couldn’t make up the facts Ben Mezrich reports here: how a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg connived his way to a huge fortune, discarding friends and co-workers along the way as soon as he no longer needed them.

What you could make up, though — as Mezrich notes, to his credit, in a foreword — is lots of dialogue, as well as details of some scenes, and almost all of what was going on in the mind of Zuckerberg, who wouldn’t talk to Mezrich.

The result is a book that goes well beyond what the author really knows. This results in some uncomfortable passages in which Mezrich tells us what “we can imagine” was happening or what “perhaps” was going on, and generally undermines the considerable research he has conducted, including reading lots of documents filed in connection with lawsuits against Facebook, and conducting what clearly were extensive interviews with principals such as Zuckerberg’s co-founder, Eduardo Saverin.

It’s quite a story — the tale of a Web site that began exclusively for Harvard students, quickly spread to other colleges, then leaped off campus and now claims more than 300 million active users worldwide.

But it’s too hard to tell what’s real and what’s made up. And though it probably would be impossible for any reader’s performance to redeem the book’s journalistic sins, Chamberlain’s doesn’t come close.

arosenbe@projo.com