Five Great Audiobooks

Audiobooks are a new spin on an old medium.  Long ago just about every story was transmitted orally, sometimes transmitted that way for centuries, before being written down.  That includes parts of the Bible, Homer's epics, and just about every native legend around the world.  So stories, many stories, are made to be read aloud and to be listened to.  Stories don't have to have a book and a reader, but they do need a storyteller and an audience.

The audiobook hasn't been around long, but it has changed the relationship between reader and text.  If you listen to many audiobooks, you quickly figure out that the narrator makes all the difference.  A bad narrator ruins everything.  I couldn't make it through one version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American because the British narrator could not come close to speaking an American accent correctly.  With another book, a Robert Heinlein novel, the narrator paused for a half-second after every sentence, a pause so long that the narrative had no flow and it became progressively irritating to listen to. So with audiobooks, not only must the book be good, but the narrator's performance has to make the book interesting.  And some books, frankly, are not written to be read aloud.

(As an aside, a great reading practice is to read a book/poem/play aloud to yourself if you cannot understand it or find it dull.  This practice can dramatically change the reading experience and may help you understand what you are reading in ways you can't imagine. It also might help you to like a book.)

Audiobooks were extremely burdensome before IPods.  Until the IPod--eons ago--you had to lug around a 6 CD set of one book, and that was only for a book of 200 pages.  Now I can carry around dozens of books on my IPod, or hundreds of hours worth of audiobooks.  So I expect the audiobook medium to improve, hopefully, given that the technological convenience of owning and transporting audiobooks has greatly improved in the past few years. 

I present here five great audiobooks.  I've listened to dozens of them, most okay, some terrible, a few excellent.  Here are some of the best.

Treasure Island. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Read by Alfred Molina.

This is perhaps the best audiobook yet made.  First, Stevenson's story was made to be read aloud. It was also made to be exciting, interesting, captivating--and as it turns out, it is all of those for all ages.  Alfred Molina reads this pitch-perfectly.  Molina is a Shakespearean actor, best known probably as Dr. Octopus in Spiderman 2.  This book won an Audie Award for audiobook of the year.

The Last Battle. By C.S. Lewis. Read by Patrick Stewart.



Serious audiophiles should be aware that, in the mid-2000s, HarperAudio released all seven books in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series. This series was expensive, I assume, because of the voice talent hired to read the books, which includes Kenneth Branagh, Lynn Redgrave, Jeremy Northam, and Derek Jacobi.  I think this is the best of the Narnia audiobook series.  That's partly because I think this is Lewis' best Narnia book, but also because Patrick Stewart does a fine job of reading it while not sounding too much like Jean-Luc Picard. 

Heart of Darkness. By Joseph Conrad.  Read by Kenneth Branagh.

I admire Branagh for a lot of things, but his dedication to audiobooks is near the top of the list.  He's overqualified to read audiobooks, but he does it anyway. What follows are two of his best efforts.  This one is from Audible's Signature series, which Audible commissioned early in 2011 but discontinued pretty quickly. I assume that this series wasn't even close to profitable. The idea behind it was that Audible would hire B-list actors to read literary "classics."  Thus Elijah Wood reads Huck Finn, and Branagh reads Heart of Darkness.  Conrad's famous book is almost all monologue, which is perfect for Branagh, who reads every word in character as if he's been studying the book for years.  This is a performance, a great performance, unlike many audiobooks, which are just simply someone reading words.


The Captain and the Enemy. By Graham Greene. Read by Kenneth Branagh.

One more Branagh narration.  This one is Greene's last novel, one of his five best and his most underrated.  Most readers are intrigued by the first half of the story, in which the narrator, a young boy, is won at gambling by a  mysterious man called "The Captain."  As usual in Greene's later work, there is international espionage combined with meditations on love and justice in the modern world.  This book also features the best use of the "King Kong" story.

Bellwether. By Connie Willis. Read by Kate Reading.

The last of my five, and I feel compelled to include a few ladies, since I have not yet done so.  Willis is a well-known science fiction author, a no-nonsense type who is skeptical of most modern ideologies.  She ably combines the screwball comedy plots of 1930s films with science fiction tropes.  That's an interesting, unusual combo.  This short novel features a female scientist who tries to discover where and how fads originate, and who gets caught up in and amongst blossoming fads herself.  There's a love story and plenty of critiques of modern pop culture.  A fun listen.