I love a compelling audiobook. I’m a sucker especially for male British narrators (bonus points if they are named Simon), followed closely by female British narrators and Lenny Henry (who actually is a male British narrator but does other accents so beautifully he gets his own category). Any narrator not in one of those three rubrics is assessed on a case-by-case basis.
I must be an aural learner, because I can recall even more detail when I’ve listened to a book than I can when I’ve read it. I wouldn’t ever choose to give up reading with my eyes — it’s hard to skim over passages of exposition in an audiobook, for one thing, and it’s a lot more difficult to locate lines you heard earlier and loved — but the pleasure of hearing someone tell a story well never gets old. We are a storytelling species, after all.
Here’s when I choose an audiobook over the printed page:
1) When I drive. (People frown upon actual reading, even—most unfairly!—at stoplights.)
2) When I’ve given up on a book that people I trust absolutely love. Years ago, I tried three times to read The Shipping News, to no avail. The staccato opening and description of the schlumpy main character left me cold. But enough of my like-minded book friends had raved about this one that finally I tried it on audio, and I’m glad I did. The Shipping News remains one of the most riveting book experiences I’ve ever had, and I can still feel the icy Newfoundland waters.
3) When I’ve read and loved a book and want to re-read it again, but don’t have time because I have stacks and stacks of galleys staring me down. I’ve ‘re-read’ (via audio) The Book Thief, The Hunger Games, The Tale of Despereaux, The Golden Compass, all of the Harry Potter books, The Great Gilly Hopkins, and many more. It’s guilt-free re-reading! Woot!
4) When I need to read a book that everyone and his brother is talking about, but I can’t seem to bring myself to pick it up. This is different from #2, where I actually have attempted to read the book and given up. Here, I can’t even look the thing in the eye but feel I absolutely MUST familiarize myself with the contents. I will not reveal any of those titles here, for obvious reasons.
I’m an unabridged kind of girl. When books aren’t available unabridged, I don’t even bother ordering them for the store. If whatever’s been cut doesn’t make a difference to the book, it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. If it does make a difference, well, I’m going to be obsessed wondering what I’m missing. Unabridged is the only way to go, although it can mean a lengthy commitment. (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I’m looking at you.)
Lately, I can’t tell if more or fewer books are being turned into audiobooks. The number of books on CD certainly seems to have diminished with the advent of digital downloading. This makes it harder for the bookstore to stock a rich mix of options for travelers, and I miss the golden age of lower-priced unabridged audiobooks we enjoyed not too many years ago. I also used to sell a lot of audiobooks with their printed counterparts to parents whose kids struggle with reading; having a child listen along while reading can help cement some of the sight words and help make meaning of a story.
I’m not sure how publishers decide which titles to develop on audio for mainstream consumers and which ones they aim primarily at library markets. There are titles that do exist on CD, but are only available at the kinds of astronomical prices clearly intended for library multi-use licenses. For example, we would love to stock R.L. LaFevers’ fabulous Grave Mercy on CD, but customers are unlikely to shell out $108.75 for it.
Audiobook Pet Peeves:
1) Narrators sometimes just don’t appeal to a listener’s ear. This is so subjective, isn’t it? Once I had an audiobook of Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses roaming the floor of my car for months. I had tried it and could not stand the narration style, so I abandoned it after about 20 minutes of listening. But the story kept nagging the back of my brain, so several weeks later I popped it in again, and this time, I absolutely loved it. Same narrator, same book, different mood. Weird.
2) Sometimes I find actor-narrrators too actor-y. I admit I had a really hard time with Brendan Fraser and the Inkheart series. His made-up voices were almost painful to hear; to my ear, many of them sounded self-conscious and overly cute. And yet, Cornelia Funke told him she’d created the character of Meggie’s father specifically for him. And some of our customers loved those recordings. So it’s very individual. And it’s not the ‘bigness’ of acting that’s the problem; many actors bring their performance chops to a piece without distracting from the story itself. Lenny Henry’s reading of Anansi Boys remains one of my all-time favorites, and his performance is big.
3) Narrators sometimes get things wrong. In The House of Sand and Fog, the narrator mispronounces a Spanish street name in California, and as a listener who had lived there, the error rudely booted me out of the story. I missed two whole chapters, so sidetracked was I by thoughts of whether audio recording artists have style sheets that indicate correct pronunciations of names and places, and if so, how this street name got overlooked. It’s never good to get bounced out of a story.
I loved Jennifer Meyers’ narration of The Orchid Thief, and Hope Davis’s A Northern Light, and Jeff Woodman’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Philip Pullman’s narration in The Golden Compass is utterly riveting, as is Neil Gaiman’s reading of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
I am craving some fantastic new listens, especially those on CD that I might carry in the store for my customers.
What children’s and YA books have you heard on audio lately that you highly recommend?
This is marginally YA, but The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is both a wonderful read and listen. I doubted that the audio could work, there were so many elvish and goblin words used, but the narrator does a wonderful job. Maya is 18 when his father and 3 elder brothers all die in an airship crash. He is half-goblin but must now take the throne of the Elflands. Wonderful commentary on power, politics, and friendship.
How annoying, don’t I know any words besides wonderful?
The Harry Potter series, of course! Never found the time to read, but they were great onCD for a road trip!
Another category you need to add is storytellers. Someone like Jay O’Callahan reading his own works surpasses the written word for total enjoyment. It’s as if he were in the room performing live!!
I agree with the lack of time to read. My book list is always endless.
I love listening to audiobooks on my long drives home from my college or internship (2-3 hours). Harry Potter is most definitely #1 for me as the narrator does such a fantastic job with such a fantastic story. I’m currently listening to Game of Thrones on and off (it’s one of those books that I like well enough, but sometimes I don’t have the time to sit down and read such large chunks of it that are usually required).
Autobiographies, when read by the authors themselves, are really wonderful too. I’ve listened to Laura Bush and Sarah Palin’s autobiographies and their accents really takes the story to a whole other level. Also, it’s more akin to a conversation when they read the words aloud and I don’t think I would have nearly the attention span if reading it on the page.
The audiobook that I have listened to the most is All-American Girl by Meg Cabot. The reader does a fantastic teenage impression. Also, it is one of the few audiobooks I actually OWN, and I always have it in the car with me so if I start to get sleepy on car rides I can at least pop that in. I realize that shows my age though (if the college comment didn’t already tip you off) so I might as well recommend The Lunar Chronicles audiobooks as well, which I haven’t read in book format, but downloaded the first Cinder on a whim. Richard Castle’s Nikki Heat books unfortunately don’t have the same narrator every time, but those were pretty good too.
Let’s see, I completely agree that British narrators are the best. Sherlock Holmes is a great one to listen to, and with the fact that they are short stories, you don’t have to stop in the middle of a great action sequence and wait until the next time you’re in the car to hear what happens (or if you’re like me, and you stay in your car for another 15-20 minutes until a chapter ends).
And I almost FORGOT! Tina Fey’s Bossypants is actually my favorite audiobook of all time. Simply hilarious.
Another audiobook that I listened to with a great accent was One for the Money by Janet Evanovich. Of course, you have to like the genre, but I had to add that one into the mix of audiobooks I’ve liked.
[Alison, Interesting comment. I didn’t notice!]
This post will make me reconsider audio books. I agree with the author about Shipping News. I’ve just put it down again. I’ll try the audio version. Listening while driving, I’m unaware of how I got from point A to point B! I’ll have to find another place to listen.
Like you, Elizabeth, I sometimes find that my memories of a book are much more vivid when I have listened to a fabulous reading on CD than when I read it. I will forever have The Book Thief etched in my mind as a result of hearing it. As a children’s book buyer, I almost always have a book on my car’s CD player and just wish that more titles came in that format. I am currently listening to The True Blue Scouts of Sugarman Swamp and am captivated by Lyle Lovett’s rendition. I just finished Candace Fleming’s book on the Romanov family and loved it as well.
Lyle Lovett?! Lyle Lovett! Why didn’t I know this? Can’t wait to listen.
favorite kid’s audios—dover publishing Winnie the Pooh
Eb White–charlotte’s web,, Trumpet of the Swan, stuart little–he reads them and perfectly
The lion the Witch and the Wardrobe–read by Michael York–flawless
Elizabeth —
Thanks (from the other side of the mic) for your succinct yet wide-ranging inventory of praise, plaints, and perplexities. Believe me, we in the Biz discuss essentially the same things often and at length, and we’re always eager to learn from listeners’ informed and thoughtful discussions.
I can reassure you on one point at least: Most professional narrators do spend time (and/or money) to research pronunciations. To help with this sometimes formidable task, my colleague Heather Henderson and I inaugurated http://www.AudioEloquence.com a few years back. AE — a catalog of pronunciation, dialect, and accent web resources that we vet, maintain, and update — is now some 150 annotated entries strong. And, as we’d hoped, it’s widely used industry-wide.
As belts tighten, producers and publishers inevitably cut corners — sometimes by loading previously out-sourced research duties onto narrators (without added payment for this time-consuming work), or by hiring talent unfamiliar with the importance of pronunciation research. So it’s important that everyone hear your voice on the subject.
Brava!
Judith West
audiobook narrator • producer • coach
A further comment – I listen to audiobooks in my car, at home while crafting, and when I go to sleep. I prefer to listen to audiobooks that I’ve already read because it’s frustrating trying to get back to where you were (before you went to sleep, for instance.) I do agree about the British narrators but some of my favorites are Charlotte Macleod’s cozy mysteries (NOT British narrators.) I buy my audiobooks from audible.com, I have a jack in the car radio that attaches to the mp3 player so I’m not dependent on CDs.
Some of my favorites:
Stephen Briggs reading THE WEE FREE MEN and the rest of Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books. (Or any other Terry Pratchett.)
Rob Inglis’s virtuoso performance of THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS
I listened to my first audiobook of L.A. Meyer’s Jacky Faber series earlier this spring as part of the YALSA Hub Challenge, and while I’m not a total Jacky Faber fan (yet, anyway), I do see why that series appears consistently in best-audiobook-of-the-year lists.
I vastly prefer Stephen Fry’s reading of Harry Potter to Jim Dale’s; sadly, the Fry versions are the British release of the Potter audiobooks, and difficult to obtain on this continent.
My teen daughters and I have been listening to A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix and really enjoying the narration and humor. This is a YA sci fi novel and we all said we probably wouldn’t have read it but for us it works well as an audio book.
Don’t miss David Tennant reading Cressida Cowell’s HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON series (Little, Brown). He is absolutely brilliant, extremely funny, and though all the characters are Scottish in his reading, he gives each one a completely distinct voice and accent so you always know who’s talking. His comic timing is a joy.
My all time fave is the Wee Free Men series (Terry Pratchett) read by Stephen Briggs. Spit out your drink hilarious!!! And Stephen is so good, I’d listen to him read the phone book. 🙂
The Finishing School books by Gail Carriger are brilliant on audio. Moira Quirk is the narrator, and her accents are fantastic. They’re my most recent discovery (before that, it was the His Dark Triumph books, which were also stellar).
Other favorites, recent and not:
Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (Maxwell Caulfield reads the bits from the Simon Snow books, and is amazing)
The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan
The Living by Matt de la Pena
Winger by Andrew Smith
The Dark Unwinding by Sharon Cameron (same female narrator as Scorpio Races)
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Insignia by S. Kincaid
And my seven year old would want me to say that the Clarice Bean books by Lauren Child are excellent on audio (and they are). She has listened to each at least five or six times. She also loves the audiobook of Nancy Clancy, Super Sleuth, and is totally bummed that they only recorded book one.