John Cleese reading The Screwtape Letters.
I’m listening to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and enjoying it quite a bit. The all time best audio books I’ve heard are the Harry Potter books…the guy who does the various voices really makes the story come alive IMHO.
I used to have the original Dark Tower unabridged audio productions done by S. King which were also very good.
-XT
My favorite audio book by FAR (we are talking light years for this) is America the Textbook by John Stewart. Its read by the cast of the Daily Show and other writers of the book and is fantastic. If you like the Daily Show or Colbert Report, give it a go!
The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brien, narrated by Patrick Tull. (There is someone else out there, and I don’t think he’s nearly as good.) I love these, listen to them again and again.
A quick word: Recorded Books has a Netflix-type program that lets you rent an unlimited number of audiobooks, which you send back in prepaid envelopes, for $29.95 a month. You get four at a time and when you send one (or more) back, they send you the next ones on your list, just like Netflix. If you read a lot of audiobooks, it’s pretty cool.
As to what books are good …
All of Carl Hiaasen’s books are great, as are all of Tim Dorsey’s books (but only the newer ones are out on audiobook – Cadillac Beach, Torpedo Juice, The Big Bamboo, and Hurricane Punch).
Christopher Moore’s books that are out are great too – The Stupidest Angel is best if you’ve read the others, because it uses a lot of characters from the others, and his newest You Suck: A Love Story is a direct sequel to his previous vampire novel, Bloodsucking Fiends, which isn’t out on audiobook. But Fluke is a great standalone book, as is A Dirty Job, and his classic novel Lamb just came out on audio: it’s the tale of Jesus’s life from the viewpoint of his best friend, Levi Who Is Known As Biff, and tells of how Jesus learned to deal with being the Son of God and the Savior of All Mankind and whatnot.
Devil in the White City is a good book if you’re into true history; it’s the story of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the hideous serial killer (H. H. Holmes) who lived right next door.
Let’s see, what else. OH! One that I know Overdrive carries, although your own library may not, is Creepers by David Morrell. It’s a very creepy story of a group of “urban explorers,” who go spelunking in abandoned old buildings, and how they go exploring in a soon-to-be-demolished giant old hotel building, and the horrors they find within.
Let’s see … oh, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is great too; a serial killer is stalking a medieval monastery, and brother William of Occam must use his newfangled powers of logic and rationality to solve the crimes before the Inquisition arrives. Unfortunately, the audio book is only available in an abridged format as far as I’ve been able to find, but it’s still decent.
Max Brooks’s World War Z, the oral history of the Zombie Wars, and The Zombie Survival Guide are both out on audio, if you’re into that kind of thing. I thought it was great, and WWZ is read by a full cast, but it’s abridged and apparently leaves a LOT out. Still, it’s a very fun thing to listen to.
If you like Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey, Laurence Shames writes great books along the same lines, most of which I’ve been able to find on audio.
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have two “Peter Pan prequel” novels that are really good. Peter and the Starcatchers is the first, and Peter and the Shadow Thieves is the second. They answer questions about where Peter and the Lost Boys came from, where Tinkerbell came from, why Peter can fly and never ages, how they got to a lost island with a bunch of pirates that hate them, etc. They’re really cool. And they’re read by Jim Dale, who does a great job just like he does with the Harry Potter books. Both of those are available at Overdrive too. A lot of Dave Barry’s other books are available there too, in fact. I don’t think his two standalone novels are (Big Trouble and Tricky Business) but those are well worth listening to if you can find them – they’re out there somewhere.
Oh, another interesting book from Overdrive: Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, about Ted Conover, a journalist who took a year-long job as a guard at Sing Sing to find out what it was like. And Saucer, a book about an alien spacecraft found buried in rock in the Sahara desert, by Stephen Coonts, is one I’m currently listening to. I’m not sure how good it is yet, but it’s moving pretty fast so far.
Um … that’s all I can think of at the moment. If you’re interested in more, I have a huge library I’ll gladly look through and pick out some more.
BTW, I just tried to e-mail you, but your e-mail is private. I’ve got a huge database of audiobooks, most of which aren’t available on Overdrive, but I can let you know where to find any of them if they appeal to you. If you want to take a look, send me an e-mail to the address in my public profile and let me know.
This reminded me that my library has a bunch of audiobooks also. So I went and downloaded a few and uploaded to my Zen. Yay!
I’ve been looking for an excuse to collect the Fry reading. One thing that bugs me about Dale’s version is how a few of the women have deep, bass voices. Luna is one of them.
I consciously avoid anything read by Flo Gibson. I heard a reading of The Jungle Books. Her godawful British accents made me break out in hives.
A River Runs Through It By Norman Maclean read by Joel Fabiani
Oh definitely. It’s not the accents for me, though, it’s that her voice is like a bandsaw. I see that she’s all over audiobook land, and I don’t get it at all. I downloaded *The Lodger *from Audible, and it’s unlistenable, between her voice and the fact that it’s boring as hell.
Oh, and I got one of the Nightmares on Congress Street productions by Rocky Coast Radio Theatre, and enjoyed it. Some of the stories are better than others, but overall very entertaining . . . have to get more of them, maybe as Halloween rolls around.
Right now I’m about 2/3 through To Kill a Mockingbird, read by Sissy Spacek and am thoroughly enjoying it. The changes she makes as each character speaks are subtle, not even enough to say she’s doing different voices for each one. Just the right amount to distinguish among them, in my opinion.
I find that the ones I listen to over and over tend to be nonfiction.
Based on how often I’d listen to them, my faves are:
Connections by James Burke
**The Day the Universe Changed ** by James Burke
Innumeracy by Paulos
The Iliad trans. Robert Fagles, read by Derek Jacobi
The Odyssey trans. Fagles, red by Ian mcKellen
A whole stack of Nero Wolde novels
Rumpole of the Bailey Three different readers have done these, to my knowledge, but you have to get ones read by Leo mcKern, who did Rumpole on PBS and does a superb job of reading them. Three different audio books companies have his work.
Money with Menaces and A Careful man by Frederic Forsythe
The Prince by Machiavelli Penguin books edition
Mark Twain by Ken Burns et al.
a Mark Twain Compendium
Edgar Allen Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone (!!! Great stuff!)
(There are also good versions of Poe by Christopher Lee and Paul Scofield)
Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (I picked this up recently, and am re-listening to it for the fifth time or so.)
John Glover (“Lionel Luthor” on Smallville) reading Ray Bradbury’s From the Dust Returned. Three-minute excerpt from Chapter 1.
I quite enjoyed Crocodile on the Sandbank, too!
I also really liked listening to Augusten Burroughs’ books. It’s first person, autobiographican quasi-non-fiction comedy writing, and it’s read by the author which makes it awesome. I’ve listened to Possible Side Effects and Dry and enjoyed them both.
Thanks again for mentioning this. I happened to have one credit still with Audible.com (from a membership earlier this year; canceled as I don’t usually purchase audiobooks) and I went online and spent it on Anansi Boys. Told Typo Knig about it and he was delighted - big Lenny Henry fan and big Gaiman fan also. 
It’s a great audiobook, you will enjoy it.
Also, anything by David Sedaris as read by David Sedaris. When he reads his own material it is just so much better than when it is read without his voice. (and it is amazingly good then.) Plus you get to hear his Billy Holliday impression which is astoundingly good.
That would be “The SantaLand Diaries.” Abso-fuckin’-lutely! I hardly even read his stuff anymore; it’s so much more fun to get the audiobook and hear him read it.
Robin Williams does a great job reading the Russian folk story The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, in his persona as an argumentative little old Jewish guy, and David Brinkley’s self-narrated Washington Goes to War is an interesting, funny, well-written look at how Washington, D.C. was transformed by WW2.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency - Written and read by Douglas Adams. Best audiobook ever IMHO. I used to listen to it every night as I went to sleep. It’s my bedtime story (though I’ve lost most of the CDs. I need to get it again and rip it onto my PC).
I also love Snow Crash, which I downloaded from iTunes & is an audible.com reading. Dunno who the reader is, but he’s good (and I’m annoyed he didn’t do the reading for The Diamond Age, because the woman who does that bugged me on the preview, and I want it but I think she’d piss me off).
I just recently downloaded The Last Continent from audible.com, but the guy who’s reading it does really overblown voices and it’s starting to grate on me. I’ll see how it goes, though, because I’m only about half an hour in.
I’d love to get more of the Pratchett stuff as read by Tony Robinson, but he only seems to do the abridged versions, and I can’t abide abridged audiobooks. Especially if it’s books I’ve read before, because then I know what’s missing and it annoys me.
I agree, that’s a good one.
That would be Nigel Planer (better known to some as Neil, from The Young Ones). I haven’t heard that particular book, but I’ve liked his reading of a couple of others I’ve heard, especially his voice for Death. I also like what I’ve heard by Stephen Briggs, who’s been doing the more recent Discworld audio books.
To the OP: We’ve had threads on audiobooks before, so just in case you don’t get enough suggestions in this thread, a little searching will come up with more.