Suggest Some Audio Books

I have had an account at Audible.com for a few months now and I currently have two credits for free books saved up and I am not sure what to do with them.

I listen to books at work and while I am in no danger of running out of things to listen to any time soon (I just bought Atlas Shrugged which is 63 hours long) I would like to use up my remaining credits. I know that the Dope is a place of great literary taste so I figured someone here might have some good suggestions.

I want to avoid anything that is in the public domain since there is a good chance I could get any of those books at Librivox and the areas that I have been looking at are History, Sci-Fi, Astronomy, Physics, and Biology, though I am not restricting myself.

I really enjoyed the audio version of Patrick O’brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels. I had read them before, but listened to one on my ipod for a flight.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
and
Doublestar by Heinlein

Two of the best audiobooks I have ever gotten. Both are actually better as audiobooks then they were as normal books because the readers to THAT good a job.

I got them on Audible so they are probably still there (though sometimes audible takes stuff off. I don’t know why)

Other good stuff I have purchased from Audible:

Terry Pratchet’s Discworld books are the SDMB recommendation of choice and David Sedaris (I am sure I mangled his last name, look up Me Talk Pretty On Day) as read by the author is a close runner up. His live one from Carnegie Hall is particularly good if you haven’t read his stuff before.

I also very much enjoyed The Devils Teeth, a nonfiction book about Great White Shark researchers.

If you want to take a crack at Ayn Rand, I think the audiobook of The Fountainhead is probably the way to go. If you are interested in that sort of thing (it isn’t very good, but you can say you know it). It will cost you 4 credits though I think.

And the 20th Anniversary edition of Ender’s Game is fully dramatized and pretty good.

Their non fiction selection is pretty good. Recently I’ve listened to and enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War - only a passing resemblence to the Tom Hanks movie and The Adventure of English - how the English language has developed since the Romans invaded.

On the fiction front, I am Legend is really well done and is really different from the Will Smith movie.

A River Runs Through It by Norman Mclean. (The book not the movie)

Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns-Goodwin.

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett.

The First American, by (blanking on name - it’s an excellent bio of Ben Franklin).

Also, professional versions of public domain works are usually at least worth a trip to the library, if not audible. librivox.org is a great place, but very very few of the books are any good. The woman who reads The Scarlet Pimpernel is great - download anything of that reader’s you can get your hands on. The Card is good, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Lord Jim are worth listening to. Most of the group reads (each chapter by a different reader) are unlistenable.

I came in to post that one also - read by Lenny Henry (of Chef! fame).

The Golden Compass (original title Northern Lights) is very well done - instead of a single reader, the voices are done by actors. I think the author did the narration other than the voices but my memory could be wrong.

I have to admit, even as an avid audiobook listener and Gaiman appreciator, Anansi Boys left me cold 15 minutes in. The reader was damn near incomprehensible to me, and while that usually works itself out after a while, I just really didn’t want to bother. I might give it another go sometime, perhaps.

Richard Feynman’s physics lectures are supposedly pretty good, although I’ve never listened to them myself.

It’s a wholly juvenile book, but if you ever read and liked Redwall, then the audiobook is a must have. It’s a cast instead of a single reader, and it’s a purely brilliant audio experience.

The Discworld series is pretty good as audiobooks.

I do not regret buying up the entire Dark Tower series, especially the books read by Frank Muller. Hands down the best reader I’ve ever come across. (Oddly, the four Dark Tower books he read don’t seem to be on Audible any more. :confused:)

So, the OP knows, the reader performs with a heavy accent for the main characters. I don’t remember if everything has an accent (because the accent is real) or if only the main characters have the accent. I liked it, but it is a good point that it might be tough to understand if you don’t have a good ear for accents.

I have to agree with this one too. The whole series is fun, but I have only listened to Redwall.

NO! That’s a freakin shame. Frank Muller was a phenomenal reader. I remember that King talked about him, in an article I read shortly after Muller died, as the only person who was able to read his books correctly. But that is the weird stuff I was talking about with Audible. I don’t know why they take some of this stuff off. You used to be able to download the whole Hitchhikers Guide series read by Douglas Adams (wonderfully I might add). But the last time I looked they didn’t offer them anymore.

World War Z is amazing as an audio book. It’s abridged, but it sounds more like a radio play than an audio book. They got a bunch of recognizable actors to read certain parts (my favorite part was Alan Alda–hilarious!).

Torpedo Juice by Tim Dorsey is my all time favorite audiobook. It’s one I can re-listen to again and again.

I also enjoyed Ender’s Game very much on audiobook.

If you like that sort of thing, Audible offers series of lectures in the “Modern Scholar” series. (Some of these have been repackaged and sold by Barnes & Noble as their “Portable Professor” series.) I’ve enjoyed Michael Drout’s series on Science Fiction, and Frances Titchener’s on the History of Ancient Rome. There are also series on astronomy (by James Kaler) and biology (by John K. Young, John Kricher, and Betsy Dexter Dyer), but I can’t vouch for them.

I’m not sure what’s available, but here Are some of the things I listen to:
Connections and The Day the Universe Changed by James Birke

Chaos by James Glieck

the Professor and the Madman
Starship Troopers and **Stranger in a Strange Land **

Bag of Bones by Stephen King (also read by King) was very good. I’m currently listening to The Gunfighter Series which is okay. Only unabridged works for me :slight_smile:

I got interrupted.

You don’t list mysteries, but I have quite a few of the Nero Wolfe stories (many unabridged) by Rex Stout and read by various people. I also have one of Robert Goldsborough’s post-Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novels on audio.

I have many Sherlock Holmes stories by various companies and readers.

I have several Rumpole of the Bailey stories, most of them read by Leo McKern, who played him on PBS (and who recorded with three different companies), as well as Michael Hordern recording some.

You mentioned history. David McCullouch’s Truman is somewhat abridged, but adds an extra dimension by including actual recordings of Truman. Of course, they couldn’t do that with his bio of John Adams.
James Michener’s The Eagle and the Raven gives parallel biographies of Sam Houston and Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, and is well worth listening to.

His collection Everything’s Eventual is great as an audiobook, but it looks like the version from Audible only has 5 of the stories (though those are each unabridged). I got a version on CD from the library which had the entire collection.

Are you familiar with the Miles Vorkosigan stories from Lois McMaster Bujold? Space opera at its finest! I can’t vouch for the audiobooks in particular (as we get the dead tree versions of her stuff) but they’d likely be pretty enjoyable. Just make sure you’re not getting any collections which are reprints of stuff published separately - e.g. Shards of Honor and Barrayar were later released as a compilation called Cordelia’s Honor or some such.

I recently listened to:
“An Innocent Man” by John Grisham (his first non-fiction, I believe)
and “Shadow Divers” by Robert Kurson, and enjoyed both immensely.

“An Innocent Man” is a little tough in that the guy that is convicted is not very sympathetic. But overall it is a fascinating recount of justice being “forced”, so to speak. And it’s not like this took place in the distant past, so it’s pretty scary that this type of “investigation” and case making likely goes on.

“Shadow Divers” is the true story of the discovery of this WWII German U-boat that sunk off New Jersey - and no one knew about it. Almost as fascinating as the description of the dives and the attempts to discover the sub’s identity is the research done that sends the divers on wild goose chases. When they finally identify the sub, the records all indicate it was sunk off Gibralter !

If you’re not averse to Harry Potter–or even if you’ve already read the print books–the audiobook versions read by Jim Dale are not to be missed. Dale is hands-down the best reader I’ve ever listened to. (Frank Muller’s readings of The Dark Tower books rank pretty high, too)

It’s amazing how well Dale can create such distinctive voices for so many different characters. I was introduced to the series by listening to the first audiobook (well before the movies came out) and he really brought the characters to life for me.

Actually I’d have to rank Barbara Rosenblat above Dale (I haven’t heard Muller’s narration yet). She mostly does woman-oriented stuff (the Mrs. Pollifax spy stories, the Amelia Peabody mysteries set in Egypt, etc.) - but I’ve actually listened to stuff simply because she was the narrator. She does wonderfully distinct voices for all the characters, and the tone of the narration part of the reading is always spot-on as well.