Given the length of my commute, the presence of two small children in my home, and the demands imposed on me by work, it’s tough to find time for all of the things I want to read. I’ve tried to deal with that for the last several months by listening to unabridged books on tape (have tried a few abridged ones, but it always feels like I’m hearing the first sentence of each paragraph and skipping the rest). My tastes run toward the literary, but I’m kind of picky about the sort of things I’ll listen to – I’m able to work in many of the non-fiction titles I want to read in spare moments just before going to sleep or at lunch (which I insist on taking out of the office for that very reason), so the audio titles are usually fiction, and usually not particularly dense. The set of titles that both interest me and are available from our library system is fairly small, but I haven’t exhausted it yet.
By far my favorites so far have been Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, as read by Patrick Tull, and Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (also read by Tull); I’ve also enjoyed the P.G. Wodehouse titles I’ve picked up, as well as Mark Harris’ baseball novels (The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly). The one non-fiction item I’ve enjoyed was Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm) – it was a good story fairly well told and not something I’d have made the time to actually read).
The thing all of these have in common is that they were produced by Recorded Books, Inc. My experience with titles produced by other companies, even titles by some of the same authors (particularly O’Brian and Wodehouse, as well as Evelyn Waugh) has been almost uniformly disappointing. The readings seem both overdone and lifeless at the same time, which one wouldn’t think possible. In the case of the Wodehouse and Waugh titles, the renditions of the various characters’ accents and mannerisms in non-Recorded Books versions were almost painful to me, and in the case of the Wodehouse titles from Blackstone Audiobooks, downright unlistenable.
I’m about ready to give up on anyone other than Recorded Books, but thought I’d ask if anyone else can recommend another producer of audio books that is consistently good; I’ve tried to give some indication of what I do and don’t like so that you’ll know where I’m coming from. Any suggestions?