chrisk: I find some of the group reading books listed as Full Cast Family and others as Bruce Coville’s Words Take Wing. These are children’s books, BTW!
I listen to audiobooks on a regular basis. As with any type of performance, some are good and some are bad.
If the idea of a single reader doing the whole thing bothers you, maybe you should ty some radio drama instead. There are some excellent collections of BBC works, including Sherlock Holmes and several Agatha Christie mysteries. The BBC Lord Peter Wimsey series featuring Ian Carmichael is also highly recomended.
If mysteries aren’t your thing, try the stellar BBC Lord of the Rings production, a twelve (thirteen?) hour full cast production, or the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. The American NPR did full cast, multi-episode versions of all three Star Wars movies (I mean, the first three… I mean, the ones that were made first… I mean, the good ones… ah, you know what I mean.) And CBS Radio Mystery Theatre offers a huge catalogue of hour-long dramas.
There’s also a lot of oldtime radio out there. The Shadow, Lights Out, The Whistler, Lone Ranger, Boston Blackie… if you give these a chance, you might really enjoy them. Some of these recordings preserve the original sponsor breaks, and often you’ll hear spots urging people to buy war bonds, or participate in scrap metal drives. A real window into the past.
But if it’s strictly readings of novels you enjoy, pay as much attention to who is reading as you would to the author. Every audiobook package (at least, everyone I’ve seen) lists the reader. You’ll find your favourites, I’m sure. I like Michael Beck (who you might remember as Swan in the movie the Warriors). He’s done some John Grisham and some James Patterson novels that I’ve listened to.
thwartme
Another vote for David Sedaris, but especially At Carnegie Hall (a collection of short pieces and essays that would later surface in Dress Your Family…) and Me Talk Pretty One Day, primarily because I really like his performance readings rather than studio. Really, all his audiobooks are pretty good, it’s just my preference coming up in this case.
I absolutely love Keith Szarabajka’s reading of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways…he’s very good at changing his voice around for the regional characters in the book. It’s awfully short, though - represents maybe a fifth of what’s in the actual text, and misses some key moments as a result. Great reader, though; it’s a shame he doesn’t appear in more audiobooks.
And, I’m a sucker for Robert Fulghum, especially Maybe (Maybe Not) and Uh-Oh, though he’s a bit more breathy and prone to emotion creeping into the read than some listeners might be comfortable with as a whole (for me, it was a selling point, but YMMV).
Another favorite series of performances for me, though not strictly audiobook, is Garrison Keillor’s monologue compilations. A good starting point is A Prairie Home Companion: 20th Anniversary Collection, as it also includes a few sketches and songs thrown in. The cassette may be preferable, as it includes more material.
For more staged, acted-out pieces, you might like anything in the Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater series. Steven Thomas Oney wrote them as radio programs, and they’re full-cast productions, if occasionally a little wooden in the acting or overwrought in the scripting. It’s not true of all the episodes, but sometimes I wince at the acting.
I love audiobooks=)
I have Tony Bourdin reciting his A Cooks Tour [from Food Channel] and he is wonderful. I have a lot of nonfiction ranging from Suetonius Lives of the 12 Caesars to The Cases that Haunt Us [which was shipped in error, but I listened to it anyway, fascinating=)] through all of the available Harry Potter, some Vincent Price reading stories from Edgar Alan Poe, to Aesops Fables=)
I just got Davinci Code…now I am not sure I want to listen to it=\
On nasty days when my cable modem connection is crappy, I will load up Civilization 3 and pop an audio book in to listen to while I am playing=) I prefer them on CD, but half of the ones I own are still on tape. I can remember back in the 60s my grandfather getting audiobooks on records [before he died he was legally blind. He would get one set of kids books and several sets of whatever he was listening to, and all of the grandkids visiting on summer holiday would get a story time in the afternoon=)]
One more plug.
We’ve got a bunch of Isaac Asimov titles on tape from Books on Tape… and they’ve all been first rate. A few different readers, (the one for ‘second foundation’ sounds a little weird, but then it’s a kinda weird book so somehow it all works out right.)
Oh man- I just finished listening to this, and I LOVED it! I thought it was one of the best read books I’ve heard, and I listen to them constantly. I thought his accents were dead on, and he didn’t change his voice in a big way for each character, just enough for you to tell who all was talking (except for Lee, who he gave a strong Brit accent to, as he should have)
chrisk: Thief of Time, one of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, was also done as a group read. Not as good, IMO, as the ones read by Nigel Planer.
The best audiobook I’ve heard was John Cleese reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. More of a performance than somebody reading, it was scary, funny and thought-provoking. I think he won an award for it.
And stay away from the *Ringworld * series put out by Books-on-Tape. The reader speaks in a nasally monotone and barely tries to differentiate the various characters.
You know my friends over at time warner audio books would crap their collective pants in GLEE at this thread. They are totaly convinced that nobody likes audio books and they are fighting agaisnt the tide of stupidity to convince the world that they are a good idea.
But, I’m getting off the point. A great audio book is Fear Itself By Walter Mosely and read by Don Cheatle. I took me almost a year, but my mother has that CD in the car’s player right now.
Oh yeah, it was up for a grammy too.
Let me second Jim Dale reading the Harry Potter series. I haven’t actually read any of the books-just listened to them IIRC, he has been nominated for a grammy at least 3 times for the series, and I believe he won for the first book. Personally, I have found that male actors tend to be better doing a variety of voices than female actors are. I don’t know why, but it seems to me that many females find it difficult to create several different male voices.
Another recommendation I have is to find books read by the author, particularly autobiographical ones. Anything by Maya Angelou is an excellent bet.
Finally, if you’re interested in those that the industry finds the best, I suggest looking here for suggestions on which readers and books are the best.
I was hesitant to listen to the full cast reading of the second and third books of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (produced by Words Take Wing) but they were fabulous! I liked them so much I went back and listened to the first one, too.
I’ll listen to just about anything Jenny Sterlin wants to read out loud. I’ve listened to a bunch of her performances and she’s always very good, but The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd and The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy by Barbara Vine really stood out.
A good reading can really make a story come alive for you. I listened to some tapes of Dick Francis books years ago. I’d looked at Dick Francis novels and decided I didn’t care for them. But listening to this reader (whose name, alas, I’ve forgotten) really brought them to life for me.
In college I’d decided that I hated James Dickey’s poetry. Then one of the readers in my Oral Interpretation of Poetry class read some poems by Dickey. I was stunned. I had never heard him that way when I read his poems to myself.
I loves me some audiobooks.
If you like fantasy, I would highly recommend Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. It’s read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, and they do a wonderful job. It’s a bit odd at first, because the reader is determined not by which character is speaking, but by who’s point of view the particular passage is from. It works well, though, and it fits with the whole male vs. female undercurrent in the books. Plus, both readers (but Kramer to a much greater extent) do a superb job of creating distinct voices for the different characters (and there are a lot of characters in the series) even down to the point of having regional accents in many cases.
And if you end up enjoying the first book in the series (The Eye of the World), then there are 9 more currently published (with a suspected total of 12 -13 once the series is completed), and each one clocks in at ~30 hours of audio per book. So you won’t be searching for more books on tape for a long while.
Silence Of The Lambs:
Movie: Fantastic.
Book: Even better.
Audiobook: Utterly outstanding. Frank Muller’s reading of this captures the characters perfectly.
Damn…I hadn’t heard about that. Well, I’m bummed now. 
Or mp3s. My mp3 player (an iRiver iHP-120) can back up anywhere from 1 to 10 seconds at a time (I think) depending on the settings you use. I think the iPod also works well. Someone mentioned audible.com above, and there are probably other places to get them.
That sounds more like a limitation of your CD player, not the CDs themselves.
(Unless you’re saying you frequently power off your CD player.)
I have the Borders Jane Austen stuff, read by Flo Gibson. Lovely.
My first thought was Jim Dale’s Harry Potter stuff. He’s fantastic. So is Rob Inglis’s Lord of the Rings.
I have Tim Robbins reading The Great Gatsby. Robbins is a great actor, but doesn’t have a great voice for reading. Once you get the hang of it though, the literature holds true.
I “read” a lot of stuff on tape (or CD) now. I don’t have time to read books much any more - and my commute time is “wasted” on literature - rather than “wasted” on radio.
I hate to just jump in with a “me too”, but it’s impossible to say enough good things about Patrick Tull as an audiobook narrator – I know because I’ve tried in other threads (like this one) 
. His readings of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels are the best audiobooks I’ve ever encountered. He’s also done most of the Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael novels and John Mortimer’s Rumpole series, several George Orwell books, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, and others. He’s outstanding at effectively conveying the nuances of each character without ever being over the top – it goes without saying that he’s impeccable at different accents and dialects, but he does it within bounds.
I’ve generally found that Recorded Books’ products are head and shoulders above any other publisher’s. The aforementioned George Guidall and Frank Muller have both done a lot of work for them, and even the titles I’ve listened to by other narrators have also been well done. I’ve found other publishers’ efforts to be very hit or miss, except for Chivers and Blackstone, which have been uniformly awful in my experience.
I can only echo what others have said but I would add that a good reader is so key to an audio book.
I remember in the early days of audio books about a decade ago, I bought a Raymond Chandler novel read by Elliot Gould. Now, Gould had done a wonderful job in one of the films of Chandler’s work so I figured it would be a safe bet this too would be good. It was terrible. On the flip side I was on the road in rural Texas and nothing was on the radio so I stopped at a truckstop and only one book looked even mildly interesting a Spencer novel read by Burt Reynolds. I dreaded it, but I need something so I put it in. It was excellent. So many times males don’t do females well (and vice versa) but Reynolds even made those believable.
I listened to another Reynolds one on another occasion and I just knew it would be good. No such luck. He sounded drunk throughout.
Another example of the book being hurt by a reader comes when one listens to a Stephie Plum novel. The first one nailed the character the later one was OK at best.
TV
I agree. And not all authors are the best interpreters of their own work. I’m usually very skeptical about an author reading his/her work. Reading are writing are very different skills.
Did you forget the joke smiley? You can’t possibly be serious. You thought his accent for Sofie Noveau was “dead on”? Kevin Costner could create a better sounding female French accent. You imagined Cyrus would sound like Karl from Sling Blade? I thought that was the single most unrealistic audiobook voice I’d ever heard.
Normally I would write this off as “different strokes” but really, and I don’t mean any offense, I’m shocked by that post. I gave it to a friend of mine and he couldn’t even finish it.
Can I get some more data points here? Did anyone else listen to Da Vinci Code on audiobook?