Dave Barry Does Japan.
Try not to wreck the car while listening to it.
Hastily writing down “Flashman” . . . on Deptford’s recommendation
Thanks. I’ve read the books, but haven’t checked out the tapes yet.
There are two separate radio play adaptation of Lord of the Rings.
The version put out by The Mind’s Eye is much easier to find on CD (it’s the one that comes in the wooden crate) but is vastly inferior in quality. American actors speaking in squeaky voices to sound like little folk, cheesy sound effects, and a script much heavier on narration than dialogue. Or at least that was the impression I got from the little of it I was able to stomach.
The other version, the one first mention in this thread by Grimpixie, was produced by the BBC, and is astonishing in every way. Ian Holm is superb as Frodo, but Michael Horton (sp?) is the most perfect Gandalf imaginable. And Peter Woodthorpe IS Gollum. The adaptation is 13 hours long, is much truer to the text than the films, and is utterly loyal to Tolkien’s epic style, including much of the poetry.
Okay, that’s the one I was thinking of and hated. The BBC has a good reputation for things like that, so that’s why I was a little surprised when I thought someone else said that it was the Beeb that produced that awful nine-disc set.
Here are a few:
The Professor and the Madman – the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary. A lot better than you might think.
The Iliad – the Bernard Fagels translation from Peguin, read by Derek Jacobi. It’s abridged, and only about 6 hours long.
The Odyssey also the Fagels translation. It’s unabridged.
Look into the unabridged Books on Tape. A lot of them are ten hours or more long. A lot of libraries carry them, and they’re very well done. In particular, I recommend their unabridged reading of The Lord of the Rings. But it’s a lot longer than 10 hours. They sing all the songs, in full.
Have you considered a long trip with a book on tape could be a prime time to listen to a book that you otherwise wouldn’t have read?
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand was a book I was always curious about but had never read. I listened to it between western Iowa and Denver one winter night as the kids slept in the back. I never would have gotten through it had I been reading it myself as Ayn favored us with many long, dry political monologues that I didn’t particularly agree with. But I was glad that I could now say that I had “read” that. Just in case it ever comes up in conversation.
(The next year I listened to some pointless drivel star wars novel. Turns out that kept me awake just as well, but left me feeling less snooty.)
I once drove to my parent’s cottage which is a few hours away from my home. I was listening to Robin Cook’s Acceptable Risk. After reaching the cottage, I drove around for 20 minutes so I could finish the book.
Stephen King makes good audiobook material. I also really liked Scott Adams’s Way of the Weasel.
All books by Douglas Adams are available as audiobooks, read by the author (except for the posthumous book). They are all fantastic. I particularly enjoyed Last Chance to See, a non-fiction about endangered species.
I’d second the recommendation for Dave Barry Does Japan. I’m Japanese and I didn’t find any of the material offensive or ridiculous. It’s a bit out of date, but things haven’t changed that much.
I also second the recommendations for Ayn Rand novels (I “read” The Fountainhead) and The Professor And The Madman. Both were far more interesting than I expected.
I buy audiobooks from Audible.com. It lets you download compressed audio files of audiobooks which you can listen to on a laptop, or transfer to an Audible-compatible portable player. I used the Rio 500 portable player and I can fit a whole unabridged novel in the 32MB memory. The iPod is also supported, but it doesn’t have enough battery capacity to play back an entire novel. Audible files are encrypted, but I find their copyright protection scheme to be reasonable. You can also burn downloaded files onto audio CDs (but not compressed files on CD-ROM).
If you want to do something completely different than the audiobooks that you’ve been listening to, you might try courses on tape. I like the ones offered by The Teaching Company. They are anywhere from 6 to 42 hours long, depending on the course. They’re approximately the level of junior or senior courses in college.
I’m not sure if this is quite up your alley, but I was absolutely hooked on Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers on a nine hour trip to Myrtle Beach last year. It actually leaves out quite a bit from the book but it’s still good stuff (especially if you haven’t read the book). I enjoyed it so much I dug it out again this year for another trip to the beach and then listened to it again not long after on local car trips.
I can second this recommendation! I’m interested in words anyway, and I thought this book was excellent.
Seamus Heaney’s version of Beowulf is good too. I first heard a bit of it when I was browsing in the local BookEars. They were playing it in the store. I thought at first I was listening to a modern fantasy novel. Then I realized that it wasn’t really modern…
Two audiobooks I found utterly engrossing were:
The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead, and
The Golden Ocean by Patrick O’Brien (that’s, what? Three O’Brien recommendations? And I don’t even like sailing.)
There’s that Audio Book world (or Talking Book World?) on Washtenaw you could try’ probably a a better selection than the megachains. I also saw some audiobooks in the basement of Afterwords (the downtown discount place).
There’s an Audio Book World on Washtenaw? Where the hell have I been? (Oh, yeah…I moved to another state. 
)
Thanks for the suggestions, gang. I am going to print out this thread and take it shopping with me before my next trip in one month. I did ultimately go with The King of Torts only because I didn’t have time to check the Dope before we visited the bookstore, and besides, the Borders on US-23 in Ann Arbor had a limited audiobook selection (basically all recent stuff).
A buddy also let me borrow the radio dramatization of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and on the side, I had Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s 2000 Year Old Man (which is not a book, but still more enjoyable than another run through my CD collection).