Audiobooks You Care to Recommend?

Dan Abnett’s WH40K Inquisitor Eisenhorn trilogy is now available on Audiobook. You can get it from Black Library or Audible. The narrator is Toby Longworth, who does a lot of WH40K audio-work and who is IMO outstanding.

If you’re at all interested in WH40K a lot of us recommended the Eisenhorn trilogy when the topic of good WH40K books came up.

The first book of the Ravenor Inquisitor trilogy is also currently available on Black Library, but not on Audible yet.

I also got the WH40K audio drama Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies via the Black Library iOS App also available on the Black Library website . I thought it was a lot of fun. Basically 1-hour drama (with multiple voice actors and voice effects) about an agent working for an inquisitor who has to root out a chaos cult on a planet.

I’m liking the Stormlight Archives audiobooks, just finished Book 2:

…and the new one is out in 10 days. Nice and long (40 hrs each or so), so I get to stick to my plan to stretch out my 12 Audible credits per year. Like I said before, I drive alot…too much…I don’t even read fiction anymore, I just listen to audiobooks on the road.

The series (including the upcoming one) is narrated by two people (a man and a woman), so there is an issue of different voices/accents for the same characters sometimes. They’ve worked to minimize that by having one narrator voice chapters that are dominated by the same characters they usually narrate. But there is a lot of crossover. I got used to it.

A bigger issue is that the chapter diagrams and background lore stuff is mainly written and doesn’t work on audiobooks. Audible does provide pdf downloads for that. Between those and on-line summaries I read after listening, it works.

[edit] I apparently disagree with Yak up above :)

Oh… and I forgot… I liked this one…another Neal Stephenson gig…

…and I’ll mention that I returned another Stephenson audiobook that I decided I hated half-way through…https://www.audible.com/pd/Mysteries-Thrillers/Cryptonomicon-Audiobook/B0036NK9D6/ref=a_search_c4_1_4_srTtl?qid=1509495977&sr=1-4
…and Audible gave me my credit back when I said the reason for the return was “I didn’t like it”.

I figure some of you here liked Cryptonomicon…that’s fine. I could not make sense of it, and found it boring.

The Innovators is excellent if you are in to computer technology history.

I’m listening right now to the audio book for Walter Lord’s Miracle at Dunkirk. It’s good, as was the one for his Pearl Harbor book, Day of Infamy.

I have not listened myself yet, but from my understanding the “First Law Trilogy” by Abercrombie is supposed to be a good audiobook. First book is called “The Blade Itself”.

Yeah, the First Law trilogy is excellent regardless, but Steven Pacey does a really great job with the voices in the audiobooks.

The First Law reader is very good. However, I’m listening to a related story right now that is read BY THE SERIES’ AUTHOR and he sucks. :(

I did not like Rise and Fall of DODO much. The main female reader is too campy, and the story overall is kind of boring. I liked the parts read by other people, and taking place in different eras, more. Especially the Irish woman in London.

I liked Seveneves a huge amount though, even the very silly Part 2 set in the distant future.

Whenever I see an audiobook that is narrated by the author, that’s typically a big strike against it. At best they are passable and at worst they are insufferable.

That said: Neil Gaiman does a really good job on his books.

Yeah, I enjoyed those books and the narrator, but to be honest I’m done with that world. Its an interesting antidote to the traditional heroes journey that you usually get in fantasy stories, but its so bleak that I don’t feel like I need any more.

Speaking of traditional fantasy stories, I’m still listening to Tad Williams “Memory Sorrow Thorn” and damn, thats a looooong book. I’m at hour 105 of 130! The narrator is good, but I’d really like the story to finish up now. Initially I was planning to keep on going with the new follow up books, but I’m thinking I’ll need a bit of a break after I’m done with the original trilogy.

Almost completely agree with this, but the one exception are non-fiction autobiographies. Aside from the fact that I am likely very interested in the person if I am interested in his/her autobiography, so additional time with that individual is welcome, I think the narration also gives me an additional opportunity to assess the veracity of anecdotes and stories since it’s often difficult to lie convincingly or to exaggerate beyond the expected lionizing (or, less frequently, self-deprecation) inherent in biographies.

I agree except for Stephen King. He doesn’t wade into narrating his fiction work often, but I like it when he does… his nasal Maine twang notwithstanding. I associate his voice with his books.

If your politics swing that way, I loved Al Fraken’s recent book:

I can’t speak for his previous ones, I’m not interested in those.

Same deal with Warren:

I dropped my “has to be long” rule for these two.

Sometimes an author’s delivery being insufferable can elevate a petty, vindictive work, which would be a little dry on paper, into something essential in audio form. I barely know anything about the rock band KISS beyond what I saw in the movie Role Models, but my friends and I can’t stop sharing clips from Paul Stanley’s autobiography, Face the Music; it’s unintentional comedy gold!

Below is a compilation of him complaining about the band’s drummer, Peter Criss, and how disappointed he is with every aspect of his personality, work ethic, and musicianship. The number of grudges he’s held onto for decades is just absurd.

I keep narrating audiobooks, because I like it.

I’ve done more than this, but these were some I particularly liked - if you have any interest in a listen, ping me and I’ll lob you a key.

A vagrant werewolf on the run shoots heroin monthly to stave off the change, but a viral video that catches him saving a doctor goes viral, and things go further south-

Sci fi that feels a bit like blue-collar ‘The Martian’ plus a dash of Alien. Book 1

Dark Fantasy novel with a dash of humor by David Goldfarb (Design Director for Payday 2, and lead designer at The Outsiders)

Check the samples to make sure my voice doesn’t make your ears bleed.

I really enjoyed listening John Hodgman’s new book, Vacationland, which is narrated by Hodgman. I’m a fan of his podcast and his persona from The Daily Show but I haven’t read any of his books before. From what I understand, this is a change of pace for him, as I think his other books are more firmly in the realm of comedy. Vacationland is an honest, poignant, and funny book about his life, particularly focused on his experiences in being/becoming a middle aged white guy. There are lots of long and entertaining anecdotes that seem a bit random at times, but i mostly all comes together. The writing and narration are excellent. It’s about 5-6 hours and I burned through it in a couple of days.

This is the most unexpected thing I’ve read in this thread so far. Kudos! You narrate audiobooks! That’s awesome.

I don’t think they would make very good audiobooks (you can try though), but The Areas of My Expertise and its 2 sequels are pretty amusing. I still think a forum where the users had to choose one of Hodgman’s 700 Hobo Names as a handle would be a transcendent thing.

I’ve just finished listening to Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, and can’t recommend it enough. Fair warning though: a quick skim of reviews on Amazon indicate it’s a divisive book - I think you have to be on board for the kind of literary fantasy (I’m not sure that’s a good description at all) he tends to write. It’s set in the afterlife, and I found it very affecting.

But the audiobook is pretty amazing. It has 166 narrators in total, each voicing a character. The main narrators are Nick Offerman and David Sedaris, who do an excellent job, and it’s kind of crazy who else they managed to get - Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Keegan-Michael Key, Susan Sarandon, Rainn Wilson, Bill Hader, Lena Dunham, Don Cheadle, etc etc. There are parts that didn’t work quite so well - there are chapters consisting of quoted sources, but the quotes tend to be short fragments, read by different people, punctuated by the name of the source text. These were maybe a little too dense, and whipped by too quickly to take it all in with too many context switches, but the overall meanings were clear enough. Oh, and Jeff Tweedy supplies the music.

One of the few audiobooks I will listen to again, I think.

Wow, that sounds more like a Radio play than an audiobook, what with having 166 narrators. Thanks, I’ll have to check that out.

I’m currently listening to Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom. It’s the story of a Polish soldier captured by the Soviets during World War 2, tortured and tricked into confessing, sent to prison in Syberia. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, and it’s just riveting. One of the most compelling stories I’ve ever watched/played/read/heard.

Apparently they made a movie based on this book too, called The Way Back. I’ll have to check that out once I’ve finished the audiobook, though I can’t imagine how it can possibly live up to the audiobook. The story is told with so much detail, it’s so vivid, and the narration by John Lee is truly excellent.

William Gibson’s Virtual Light narrated by Frank Muller

Agreed, though as you pointed out, Gaiman is good.

Favorite Audiobooks (out of hundreds I’ve listened to). Note: I typically listen at 1.25x speed, so some of these narrators may be insufferably deliberate at 1x speed.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Read by a large cast, with varying examples of Jamaican patios. There are parts of this book that I think would be unintelligible if not read aloud.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel by Susanna Clarke
A delightful cagey British narrator with perfect intonation who perfectly conveys the satirical bent of the novel.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Ali Ahn is fantastic here. I especially like her narration as Ship, which has a nice reverb effect added to make it sound slightly artificial.

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
Michael Boatman has a soothing mellifluous voice and really delivers on the various accents of the characters in this novel.