The Best Books to Listen To

Before there were books, there were still stories. Epic poems recited and improvised upon around a bonfire at night. Passed by word from one generation to the next and spread from one village to the next until some bright kid invented the alphabet and wrote all these stories down. Even today some cultures maintain that oral legacy of storytelling. Now you can recreate the experience of listening to great oral works, too! Below are three categories of books that work particularly well in audio format, as well as a few suggestions of the best authors and readers available.

1.      Epic poems, obviously.  Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were originally heard, not read.  Sometimes listening to poems teaches you a lot about the meters and rhyme schemes, even more than just looking at the words. 

o   Homer’s The Iliad and  The Odyssey

o   Virgil’s The Aeneid

o   Beowulf

o   Dante’s The Divine Comedy

o   Milton’s Paradise Lost

2.     Mystery novels.  Have a hard time not looking ahead and discovering whodunit? Or, in a lesser transgression, you tend to look over the pages you’ve already read until you find the clinching clue that solves it prematurely? Then a book on CD is right for you! No more skimming the text looking for the deciding “THE BUTLER DID IT!” sentence. You’re stuck with the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. 

o   Agatha Christie mysteries (I especially like the audiobooks read by Emilia Fox, Hugh Frasier, and David Suchet)

o   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels

o   Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax espionage series (read by Barbara Rosenblat, who is perhaps my favorite audiobook reader of all time)

3.    Really long books for really long car rides. Ever have that really thick novel sitting there rebukingly holding your door open? You’ve promised to read it so many times. But the print is so small! The book is so heavy! You find  yourself drifting off into a daydream before you finish the first paragraph (especially since the paragraphs are whole pages in length themselves!). Try listening to the audiobook version. You can generally stick with it if you have something productive you can do while listening: a cross-country road trip, reorganizing your closet, doing puzzles… What? Did you really finish Don Quixote in a month?   

o   Don Quixote

o   Anna Karenina

o   Crime and Punishment

o   The novels of Jane Austen

o   The novels of Mark Twain

o   The novels of Charles Dickens

Purchasing audiobooks can be rather expensive compared to paperback copies of the same novels, but I discovered the joy of audiobooks through the local library. Personally I always look for unabridged versions, but you can find abridged books or dramatized (that is, every character is read by a different voice actor) versions as well. 

There are also several companies that produce audiobooks. The most reliably quality books I’ve found are produced by Blackstone Audio (now Downpour.com), Books on Tape, RecordedBooks Inc., and Tantor Audio. 

Happy Hearing!