Recommend me an audio book

[rachelmanija]

I have an Audible Plus membership, Amazon Prime is putting a bunch of audiobooks on sale right now, and I'm doing a lot of driving.

Please recommend me some audiobooks! I'm looking for books that are enjoyable as audiobooks, not just good books that have an audio edition. My favorite audiobooks include The Only Good Indians, Wylding Hall, Chiwetel Ejiofor reading Piranesi, Rob Inglis reading Lord of the Rings, and Donna Tartt reading True Grit.

Comments

[sartorias]

I don't know if you liked A Stranger to Command, but the narrator of that one did a terrific job, I thought.

One of the Sharpe's Rifles series got me happily from Tucson AZ to Fort Worth, TX a bunch of years ago. If you're interested I could track down the narrator.

Did you ever try Patrick O'Brian? There's one narrator who is absolutely terrific.

[adrian_turtle]

Patrick O'Brian narrated by Patrick Hull is wonderful. Simon Vance? Not so much.

[sartorias]

VERY true.

[sillylilly_bird]

The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan read by Suzy Jackson - Suzy's performance is perfection.
Those Who Went Remain There Still by Cherie Priest read by Marc Vietor and Eric Michael Summerer
Salsa Nocturna: Stories, Half-Resurrection Blues, Midnight Taxi Tango, and Battle Hill Bolero by Daniel Jose Older ready by the author

Are you looking for fiction primarily? I have a lot of non-fiction recommendations too.

[rachelmanija]

Yes, absolutely.

[sillylilly_bird]

another fiction: Snow Day by Julie Lipson

Lots of interesting stuff here, depending on your areas of interest :)

The Deadly Dinner Party and Other Medical Detective Stories by Jonathan Edlow

The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir by Steffanie Strathdee

Spillover by David Quammen

Chernobyl by Serhii Plokhy

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth by Thomas Morris

Forensics by Val McDermid

Human Errors by Nathan H Lents

Evil Has a Name by Paul Holes, Jim Clemente, Peter McDonnell - this is the actual investigators talking about the history of what ended up being the Golden State Killer's crimes and quite a few survivors are in this as well. Audio quality/editing isn't the best, but it's quite fascinating

The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman - contains what I consider to be the single most horrific act done to a human - if you listen, we can touch base and compare notes

Dead Mountain by Donnie Eichar - the most plausible explanation for the vanished Russian hikers I have heard

Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI by Candice DeLong

Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan


Great Courses
I think I have all of Roy Benaroch's courses:
-Medical Mysteries Across History Parts 1 and 2 are fun.
-Medical School For Everyone: Grand Rounds Cases
-Medical School for Everyone: Emergency Medicine
-Medical School for Everyone: Pediatrics Grand Rounds
-The Skeptic's Guide to Health, Medicine, and the Media

Another great lecturer is Dorsey Armstrong, I also have all(?) of her courses. My favorite is -The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague-. If you ever get the chance to watch the video version, DO IT!! The set has several little stuffed rats hidden and they change position every lecture :D
-Great Minds of the Medieval World
-King Arthur: History and Legend
-The Medieval World
-Turning Points in Medieval History
-Years That Changed History: 1215

Included in your membership:
-Medieval Myths & Mysteries
-Powerful Women of the Medieval World


Kara Cooney
-Powerful Women Who Ruled the Ancient World

Elizabeth Murray
-Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals

Paul Root Wolpe
-Explaining Social Deviance

John McWhorter - linguistics for the win!
-Language A to Z
-Language Families of the World

Anne Curzan
-The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins

[sillylilly_bird]

oh, if you want to start with the narrator and find new stuff that way:
Barbara Rosenblat - she's genius, absolutely, utterly genius
Suzy Jackson
Kathryn Hvam
Suzanne Toren

[sheliak]

Barbara Rosenblat did audiobooks of the Mrs. Pollifax series!

[isis]

I recommend the late Katherine Kellgren, who is my favorite audio book reader ever. Here's her Audible catalog. I was going to rec her reading of Monstrous Beauty by Elizabeth Fama (it's a YA mermaid story, my review is here) but she's got a lot of books at Audible so you may find something else you like!

I also really love Lisette Lecat's narration of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, which is a delightful slice-of-life-in-Botswana series.

[ambyr]

I really loved Noma Dimezweni's narration of Steeplejack (YA gaslamp fantasy set in a vaguely South Africa analogue). Adenrele Ojo's narration of Conjure Women (gothic set in pre/post Civil War south, with a formerly enslaved woman as the protagonist) also worked really well for me, although I was less enamored of the actual book.

[misbegotten]

The audiobook of Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows is quite good.

[ironymaiden]

Narration that enhances:
* The Rivers of London books (can't remember the narrator's name, Kobna something)
* Mary Robinette Koval reading October Daye
* The "full cast" version of Dune
* The Star Wars novel Ahsoka read by the original voice actor Ashley Eckstein
* Stephen Fry has an audible original called "Victorian Secrets"
* Audible sells several of "The Great Courses" and I think they're some of the best bang for your credit
* If you love some NPR Glenn Weldon wrote a book on the history of Batman and his reading (complete with impressions of Comic Book Guy and Lego Batman) is a delight

[philomytha]

Seconding Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's Rivers of London recordings, they really add an extra dimension to the story.

[derien]

I did try a couple of other books read by him and didn't like them near as well, so I have to give some credit to Ben Aaranovitch. ;) "Blue Remembered Earth" was... Ok. I felt like there was a lot of this business of people making weird decisions or assumptions because the author didn't know how to get his plot to go in the right direction in a natural way.

[adrian_turtle]

I haven't heard the full cast version of Dune, but I want to warn against the full cast recording of Kindred. They changed the story, and every change I noticed on the first tape weakened it.

[rachelmanija]

Kindred by Octavia Butler?

[adrian_turtle]

Yes. It did not occur to me there would be another, though I should expect a single-word title to be used for lots of books.

[derien]

I am in love with Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's voice. I don't listen to other audio books, just Rivers of London over and over.

[loligo]

Trevor Noah's memoir Born a Crime is just fantastic. So glad I got it in audio.

[swan_tower]

I will shamelessly say I got excellent narrators for both the Memoirs of Lady Trent (Kate Reading) and The Mask of Mirrors (Nikki Massoud).

Beyond that, I'm afraid I can't really make recs, as I don't have any good audiobook-listening situations in my life and therefore don't know very many.

[ursula]

I'm very curious about Rose Lerner's The Wife in the Attic, which is only available as an Audible book right now (the print version comes out this fall).

[carbonel]

I bought the audiobook of Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor. I've listened to it several times because the narrator does such a good job of reading. And because I love the book, of course.

If you have any interest in the audiobook of The Silmarillion (admittedly not to everyone's taste), Martin Shaw does a great job of reading that one.

[likeadeuce]

I just finished Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge, a historical novel about a young women in the United States and Haiti in the post-US Civil War era. It was a really good book but I was particularly impressed by the narration.

Also Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson truly has one of the most interesting audio narrayors; the book is weird and delightful itself -- it's sort of about toxic female friendships and class divides and the challenges of parenting, but it's much stranger than that -- and the narrator does a very specific regional Appalachian accent that you don't here much/ever in media.

[dirty_diana]

I'm realising I mostly only renember when audiobook readings are terrible, but the audiobook to A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue was great. Read by some dude who was in Harry Potter, but don't ask me to identify dudes who were in Harry Potter. The sequel is not read by him, but still well-done. (It's YA adventure/fantasy with a bi protag, though most recs only mention the last part.) Going to think if I can remember any others!

[helen_keeble]

Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky has a GREAT set of narrators (a different one for each POV). The guy voicing Rex, a bioengineered dog soldier who is the main character, does a superb job. It's also one of my favourite Tchaikovsky books.

I really enjoyed the narrator for Clockwork Boys (by T Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon).

Everything else I've been listening to on Audible is, uh, Warhammer 40k, so possibly not of general interest to you (I listen to A LOT of WH40k audiobooks).

[rachelmanija]

The audio of Dogs of War seems completely unavailable in the US. Grrr...

[helen_keeble]

It’s showing up on audible.com for me:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Dogs-of-War-Audiobook/B07L9DKYLV?qid=1624556205&sr=1-3&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_3&pf_rd_p=83218cca-c308-412f-bfcf-90198b687a2f&pf_rd_r=H641EX6RX581RWQEEHHC

[rachelmanija]

Title Not For Sale In This Country/Region
We're sorry, Audible is not authorized to sell this title in your country/region. Please consider another book.

BOOO.

Could you rip it for me?

[mildred_of_midgard]

I don't do audiobooks, so I asked my partner. She said Toni Morrison reading her own books is amazing, and she'll check her Audible collection for other recs.

[sheliak]

The Heartstrikers series by Rachel Aaron - though the narrator did get a bit over the top on the emotional moments as time went on, but overall I thought it was well done.

For YA, I really liked the narrator in the Trials of Apollo series by Rick Riordan. (I also think the Kane Chronicles by the same author is much better in audio than in print.)

[ethelmay]

Peter S. Beagle reading Tamsin is very good. And the Patrick O'Brian books as previously mentioned (isn't it Patrick Tull, not Hull?).

[athenejen]

Being a passenger on long car trips tends to put me to sleep, and most audiobooks do not seem to be able to prevent that. So far there has been only one audiobook that I didn't drift off during at all: The Martian by Andy Weir. Unfortunately it looks like Audible re-recorded it last year with Wil Wheaton and the previous version by RC Bray (the Bray version is the one that I found so riveting) is no longer available on Audible. But if you can find it at the library or something, it's well worth the listen.

I agree with everyone else who has mentioned it that Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's work on the Rivers of London audiobooks has been excellent and has enhanced the books for me.

I've just started the audiobook for A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik and am enjoying the reader's voice a ton -- she really doubles down on the sarcastic, bitter teenager and it works perfectly for the main character.

[telophase]

AUGH they used WIL WHEATON? The dude can't do voices to save his life!

[ethelmay]

How many voices are there in The Martian? I remember it as 99% the guy by himself (admittedly it's been a while).

[telophase]

There’s several scenes set on Earth, with several different characters. But Wheaton doesn’t perform, he reads, and that grates on my nerves.

[taelle]

Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher mysteries were done in audiobook format by Stephanie Daniel and she is fantastic.

[mific]

The multi-reader audiobook of World War Z by Max Brooks is brilliant, as is the book. Yes it's about the zombie apocalypse, but treated as a historical record after humanity has survived, with many peoples' accounts which makes it both fascinating and less horrific. Also, trained zombie hunting dogs!

And thanks for asking for these recs - I'm saving the link to this post for future audiobook exploring!

[gwynnega]

Patti Smith reading her memoirs Just Kids and M Train.

[laurashapiro]

All the Amitav Ghosh audiobooks are really well done. I particularly liked The Hungry Tide.

[ejmam]

I really enjoyed the Unexpected Mrs Pollifax I listened to on my last drive across Washington. I prefer rereads for driving audio, so if I get distracted by driving I don't worry about rewinding. But if you like new books there are probably Pollifaxes you haven't gotten to yet.