Best audiobooks for someone who doesn't listen to audiobooks
July 17, 2018 10:41 PM   Subscribe

I really need to cancel my Audible account, but I have 5 credits to use up. Help me out?

So I'm not a huge fan of audiobooks/podcasts/spoken verbal media, and usually prefer reading books and listening to my music playlists. I'm slowly starting to warm up to the idea of audiobooks though, as I go on longer drives and sometimes my eyes are either too busy or weary for them.

Would anyone recommend any audiobooks that would completely turn onto the genre, that I would never regret having lifetime access to? Your personal favorites with passionate recommendations would be very welcomed.

The books I currently have downloaded are:
Neverwhere [BBC Cast Adaptation] by Neil Gaiman
Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler
Redefining Realness by Janet Mock (an excellent memoir, by the way)
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

I'm basically a fan of anything with riveting plot and characters and beautiful but concise prose (informative, I know...). I think my dislike for audiobooks stems from how I tried listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks and couldn't stand it because it made me realize that I would have edited out half the book or at least re-written significant portions of it. It was so verbose and clunky in several places, so I wish to not repeat that experience.

Recent books that I've enjoyed rereading include the His Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman, but I have that checked out on Libby already and don't wish to use my Audible credits for that.

Bonus points if you could find some amazing stuff that centers queer/people of color/has feminist themes in fantasy/science fiction. I also love really informative history and nonfiction as well. Genuinely, I am honestly happy with anything and am also really into exploring new genres/writers. Atmospheric and concise prose would be absolutely lovely - maybe the book version of the 80 Days game (British-style prose but with decolonial/feminist themes is ideal). Just something that would make me want to grab my friends and share it with them and be really freaking excited, maybe? I play Dungeons and Dragons? Thanks in advance for all the help!
posted by yueliang to Writing & Language (38 answers total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: And sorry, I'm kind of clunky when it comes to describing some things. I actually have no idea what Jules Verne-style prose is written in, but it definitely is not the stuff I've read in American prose stylings that I've read so far. However, I am really woefully underread and might just be talking out of my ass, and would like to use these audiobooks as an opportunity to 'read' even more very good stuff, especially since I'm trying to improve my own writing as well. Also, women/nonbinary/trans/queer authors are also really welcome as well.
posted by yueliang at 10:47 PM on July 17, 2018


Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay is wonderfully narrated. It’s a collection of essays, which gives it an episodic feel that might appeal.
posted by assenav at 10:52 PM on July 17, 2018


Best answer: I was in a similar situation as you, wanting to cancel and credits outstanding.

I purchased a few Great Courses on music - one that I like quite like is the one about JS Bach. I also purchased some Courses on jazz.

The Courses feature narration as well as music. The one that I am listening to is providing me with a historical and cultural context to the pieces that I love.

Audible has great deals on the Courses, perhaps one of the items in the catalog will catch your eye.
posted by seawallrunner at 11:07 PM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Best answer: The audiobooks for the Abhorsen series (start with Sabriel) are read by Tim Curry and he is magnificent. The books are great on their own but his reading is the icing on an already-wonderful cake. They are science fiction/fantasy without a ton of exhausting world-building and feature strong female lead characters.
posted by corey flood at 11:21 PM on July 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Best answer: Privelege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner is a fantasy of manners with a little more than just a 'reading' (music, multiple narrators) but not quite a full cast. I found the story itself, about a young woman trained in sword fighting by a rich crazy uncle so she can scandalize society utterly charming. Definitely feminist friendly and queer friendly (at least by my straight male standards but I think I'm on solid ground saying this.)

Also liked audio versions of Lovecraft Country (African-American themed riff on Lovecraft), Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Jemison), Trigger Warnings (Neil Gaiman short story collection)
posted by mark k at 11:37 PM on July 17, 2018


Best answer: I have been listening to The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter By Theodora Goss, which won an Audie Award and was nominated for a Nebula Award. The narrator is absolutely superb; she performs several characters with lots of dialogue and nails every one. The book is just fun. It’s really not deep, but it is a Victorian adventure with an overtly feminist bent. It is set in a Victorian timeline wherein Jekyll & Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Moreau, and Frankenstein, among others, are all real. Several women who were survivors of the fallout from those stories get together and form a ragtag team of investigators to solve the murders of sex workers in London. I think the only downside is some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional, which usually drives me bonkers, but the book has its other charms.

I have also just started The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t like the narrator quite as much, but he’s okay, and as usual Le Guin’s storytelling is mesmerizing.
posted by shalom at 11:59 PM on July 17, 2018


Best answer: Enough for 55 hours of driving:

Titus Groan
Gormenghast
Titus Alone
posted by flabdablet at 12:05 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I own the audiobook of Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood, have listened to it several times and loved it every time. Feminist themes abound. Plus, it's a riveting story, well narrated by three different voice actors, and featuring hymns written by Atwood and sung by "God's Gardeners."
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:11 AM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Best answer: I'm not much of a book listener – I definitely prefer to read. But I've listened to Ann Leckie's SF trilogy read by the outrageously talented Adjoa Andoh probably 30 times over. Once I finish Ancillary Mercy, I start over from Ancillary Justice again... and again. I must have run a thousand kilometers in the company of Breq, Seivarden & co. When I think about the characters, I hear Adjoa Andoh's voice(s). I adore Leckie's writing, but Andoh's delivery is just about perfect, a real bonus to prose that's already outstanding as such. It's a comforting thought that I can return to these audiobooks whenever I feel like I need them for distraction from news, to lift me up, to provide new insight into writing when I enjoy the dialogue, the characters, the plot, the worldbuilding... It's an obsession, all right, but I'm having too good a time to care.

tl;dr – Leckie's trilogy is a blast to read, but the British audiobook version is, pardon my French, fucking brilliant (or possibly, to quote Seivarden, fucking badass).
posted by kaarne at 12:39 AM on July 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


Best answer: Oh, one more thing:

Also, women/nonbinary/trans/queer authors are also really welcome as well.

Leckie's trilogy itself deals with gender issues – you'll see... er... hear. Also, I find her prose refreshingly concise and effortless. Breq's voice, the narration, oh dear, I'm gushing again.
posted by kaarne at 12:44 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: (Totally blown away by all of the comments here, wow, you all are SO GREAT. Please keep them rolling! Absolutely have never heard of any of these before (except for The Left Hand of Darkness), and that's just exceedingly wonderful and exciting for me!

Just providing some additional info: I am also interested in exploring the mystery genre, as well as any other well-written/well-read genre fiction that has knocked your socks off, or stuff that melts genres, so if you have any that fit that, I am also super down! Literary too, although I don't really know what that means, since can't genre fiction also have interiority?

I also just came back from seeing the British Museum/Louvre and am deeply in love with museums but also love decolonial history because wow did they not cite so many things in those dinky little descriptions like where they stole the artifacts, so history is important too. I studied Ethnic Studies in undergrad. I'm also a super aficionado of music and like drawing too. I'm basically a hummingbird when it comes to books and wannabe when it comes to audiobooks.

The Audible website is just too damn overwhelming for me and I have decision paralysis, so all of this is so helpful! So uh, just really, throw me anything you really, really like. I'll stop commenting here and look forward with glee to the answers :D)
posted by yueliang at 12:50 AM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: one of my all time favourite audiobooks is Neil Gaiman's Ananci Boys, read by Lenny Henry. You don't really need to have read American Gods first, though it's sort of a sequel (though, American Gods is great as an audiobook as well) Lenny Henry's narration is just tons of fun, he does awesome voices for the characters, I've listened to it many times.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:03 AM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Best answer: Not Audible, but for shorter SF/F pieces, absolutely try out the excellent Clarkesworld Magazine Podcast (info here), narrated by Kate Baker. Access is free, the podcast airs twice a month (with each issue of the magazine, in other words), the authors are diverse, and the archives go back to 2008, so you have a lot to choose from. Additionally, the stories appear in the magazine's web site if you feel like going back to read them. Verge review here.
posted by taz at 1:08 AM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Best answer: I really enjoyed ready player one, read by Wil Wheaton
posted by JonB at 1:32 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I was converted to audiobooks by a long commute and Trevor Noah's 'Born a Crime' autobiography. Fascinating and mostly hilarious personal account of apartheid while it was dismantling.
posted by cobaltnine at 2:37 AM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Best answer: The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni is a literary mystery that's a mediation on science, art, ecology, love - birds. I loved it so much I bought a friend a hardcopy and still think of it from time to time.

I'm also fond of Great Courses' Food, a cultural culinary history, about 18 hours. I listened while cooking and had an enjoyable few weeks there.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:11 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: The Maddaddam trilogy as a whole is wonderfully narrated and produced, not just The Year of the Flood.
posted by MiraK at 3:41 AM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Best answer: I really like Caitlin Kiernan’s The Red Tree And especially The Drowning Girl. Evocative prose, interesting queer characters, beautiful descriptions, and laberynthian plots. They are horror, or horror-adjacent, and they require fairly close listening (both use unreliable narrators and leave a lot for the reader to figure out), which might count against them for you.

Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series are very well read, engaging urban fantasies. Not queer, but it has good woman characters and some address to race in the UK.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaVelle is well-written and -read horror on race in the US and Lovecraft.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:50 AM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: I find as a general rule books written in the first person do very well for those who have a hard time getting into audio books.
posted by jmsta at 6:09 AM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: Have you tried any "full cast" readings?
posted by glibhamdreck at 6:17 AM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: I have listened to quite a bit of Octavia Butler. So many tentacles.

Recommendation: Both books by Madeline Miller are AMAZING as audio books. Perfect narrators, nicely paced story, get into the themes you mentioned you like. They are my new favorites.
posted by skrozidile at 6:31 AM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series are very well read, engaging urban fantasies.
Seconding this!
posted by soelo at 6:38 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Sorry, should have mentioned the book titles, probably.

Song of Achilles
Circe

SO GOOD.
posted by skrozidile at 7:08 AM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: I just listened to Dread Nation. It was a woman of color led, rollicking girl-power adventure, Reconstruction Era alternate history, indictment of white supremacy, and zombie novel. Very fun. It got a tiny bit slow in the middle but otherwise a great, distracting, immersing listen. You also might be interested in the answers I got when I asked about queer and POC detective novels recently.
posted by latkes at 7:21 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: The best - and I mean the BEST - audiobook I have EVER listened to is An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, read by Cherise Boothe. This is a pretty big thing for me to say, because I love audiobooks. Cherise Boothe might be the most intensely engaging reader I've ever had the privilege to listen to. Rivers Solomon is a woman of colour and the book centers the stories of non-neurotypical women and people of colour. And the story is just - wow! It's a dark afrofuturist take on the generation ship concept and it's GREAT. There aren't enough superlatives for me to explain how good this whole audiobook experience is.
posted by DSime at 8:08 AM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Actually I think I misspoke, I just looked at Rivers Solomon's bio on their website and they are using 'they' pronouns so I don't think I was correct to gender them as a woman. They are a great author though!
posted by DSime at 8:13 AM on July 18, 2018




Best answer: The Riverside series by Ellen Kushner has feminist and queer themes with drama and worldbuilding: swords with a touch of sorcery meets comedy of manners meets political intrigue.
It's partially dramatized, the more introspective and expository scenes are simply narrated while conversations are done with a full cast, incidental music, and sound effects. I've never been so immersed in audiobooks as with this series.
posted by buildmyworld at 8:56 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I love the Rosamund Pike reading of Pride & Prejudice and the Mia Farrow reading of Rosemary's Baby.
posted by lampoil at 9:35 AM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: Seconding the audiobook of The Power. I had some problems with the book (well, my book club had a nice long discussion about problem of trans identity in the situation of the book, anyway), but the audio was just dynamite. Similarly, I loved Hilary Huber's read of The Library on Mount Char so much I even went and sought out other things she'd narrated on Overdrive.

Not as solid but absolutely amazing anyway was Nisi Shaw's Everfair, which is an alternate steampunky history involving an alliance between Fabian socialists, American ex slaves, and a Congolese tribe to drive out King Leopold and establish a new country in the Congo. Queer relationships, diverse and flawed but sympathetic characters, all the fun stuff. There's parts I think I would have gotten bogged down in if I were reading hard copy (I'm not a huge fan of airship battles, for example), but the audio was really gripping.
posted by theweasel at 10:23 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: This doesn't answer your question, but if you need more time to decide and don't want to keep accumulating credits, you can contact customer service and ask them to put your account on hold for up to 3 months. You won't be billed but can still spend the credits you already have during this time.
posted by gennessee at 12:44 PM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: This suggestion is a little out of left field, but — I had trouble getting into audiobooks for a long time, and my gateway into that was audio drama/radio drama. Audio drama is a little bit more engaging for my brain (which wasn't used to taking in story in audio form; I'm a longtime reader too). It does a lot of interest-grabbing things that audiobooks don't — incidental sound and music, concise scenes, voice acting, etc. And after acclimatizing my brain to audio drama, I found it way easier to get into audiobooks. So that's a possible route to try, too.

Some of my favourites:
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a sf classic for a reason: it's a great example of what audio drama can do. I like the full-cast radio plays even better than the books.
• Cabin Pressure — a modern audio comedy that's a gateway drug for many! It stars Benedict Cumberbatch, and it's funny and compassionate and has depth of characterization that's on par with even the most literary things. It isn't sf/fantasy but it's a great intro to audio drama; I don't know anyone who doesn't love it.
• Undone is a fantasy series about alternate Londons; it's very dreamy and philosophical and whimsical, with an excellent woman protagonist. It's my favourite piece of audio fiction.
posted by fire, water, earth, air at 6:35 PM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Best answer: To me, the narrator is 95% the key to making a great audiobook. I adored Michael Page's performance of The Lies of Locke Lamora-- so much so that it is the book that convinced me audiobooks were just as valid as print books. Kate Mulgrew's performance of NOS4A2 is fantastic, as is Steven Weber's reading of IT (if you're in the mood for some long horror). I haven't listened to Wil Wheaton's reading of Ready Player One, but it's often mentioned as a great one. I did really love his reading of The Collapsing Empire. The full cast version of American Gods is great, as is the full cast version of World War Z. There's also a full cast version of Dracula that is fantastic. (Tim Curry as Van Helsing!)
posted by lovecrafty at 8:01 PM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Can’t say it fits your stated genre preferences, but Carrie Fisher’s reading of her own The Princess Diarist made me laugh out loud many times.
posted by AnOrigamiLife at 11:12 PM on July 18, 2018


Best answer: Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series are very well read, engaging urban fantasies.

Thirded!! One good actor does a crowd of voices and accents, all consistently and not-showily. Really like the stories, too.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:44 AM on July 19, 2018


stuff that melts genres ... Literary too

Geek Love. That is all.
posted by flabdablet at 1:18 PM on July 19, 2018


Lincoln in the Bardo is a great book in the first place and the audiobook has a completely bonkers cast list that includes Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, Don Cheadle, etc.
posted by speicus at 3:50 PM on July 20, 2018


Becky Chambers' A Closed and Common Orbit and its sequels are fun feel-good science fiction with strong female and non-gender binary characters. I thought the audiobook narration complemented the tone of the text well.
posted by mumblelard at 5:48 AM on July 25, 2018


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