audiobook recs?

[ratcreature]

I usually don't listen to audiobooks, because I prefer reading to listening and sometimes find it hard to follow them.

Unfortunately I may need to undergo another eye treatment, and usually these come with cruel reading/screen time restrictions and admonitions to avoid any eye strain afterwards. So to prepare, I'm looking to get some audiobooks to make the internet withdrawal less horrible.

Comments

[caiusmajor]

For whatever reason I find HP Lovecraft a lot easier to deal with in Audiobook form, and a lot of his stuff is available free and legal since it's public domain: see here for example https://librivox.org/collected-public-domain-works-of-h-p-lovecraft/.

Otherwise the audiobooks I listen to tend to be pretty dependent on what my local library has -- I've listened to a good bit of Terry Pratchett that way, and Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle and its sequels. Library audio CDs are particularly useful because I can borrow them and then rip them to mp3 for later. But, I assume what is available in your area is going to be pretty different.

[ratcreature]

I've never looked at what my library offers. Previously I've cadged from my brother who has some kind of Audible subscription thing, that he allowed my tablet to share in.

[zing_och]

Hmmm... Audible has a lot of Bill Bryson, read by himself, which is pretty interesting.

in fiction, I like Ellen Kushner's books, and I just started listening to Waler Moers' Zamonien books - those are veeeery long, too, and I like Dirk Bach's reading.

I think you read the Rivers of London books already? They're really good as audio books.

[ratcreature]

Thanks for the tips. And yeah, I've read the Rivers of London.

I'm unfamiliar with Bryson? What does he write?

[zing_och]

Ah, sorry! Bill Bryson writes nonfiction in an accessible and funny way. Most well-known is probably "A Short History of Nearly Everything", which is precisely what the title says. *g* I've listened to that one and had fun, but I actually liked "Made in America" better, which is about American English and English English language (and culture). My favorite of his is "At Home" - it's about domestic life, and he uses his own house, an old rectory in Norfolk, as a starting point.

[cofax7]

I find that some fiction just doesn't work well in audio form. Generally the prose has to be good, but need not be great so long as the reader is good. Really dense prose is either impossible or excellent--again depending on the narrator. The stuff I have liked best as audiobook:

All of Discworld, read by Stephen Briggs, who was born to read Pratchett.

Bujold's Vorkosigan books and the Chalion books.

Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series.

Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series, read by Patrick Tull. So good. Even the scenes I don't understand precisely are somehow comprehensible and exciting!

Seconding Bill Bryson from above: he reads his own stuff, and it's quite charming.

Stephen Fry's narration of Harry Potter, which is ridiculously great.

Stuff that really hasn't worked for me: Margaret Atwood, Iain Banks, & Ken Follett (don't let the reviews fool you, Pillars of the Earth is simply dreadful and cannot be saved by any reader, no matter how talented).

There is some very good audiofic out there as well: I do recommend the Retrogradeverse stories by LTLJ.

[ratcreature]

Thanks for the tips. So considering that I've never read any Discworld, which book is a good start (I vaguely recall that order was complicated)?

I never felt any desire to read anything by Follett, so the audiobooks being dreadful too is no great loss...

[cofax7]

The question of how to read Discworld comes up so often there's a chart! Check it out!

I tend not to recommend starting in order as written, because the first few are pretty weak. You could start with Guards, Guards!, which is the first of the City Watch novels and gives you a pretty good idea of what Pratchett is like.

Or you could try one of the one-offs like Small Gods, which is really excellent. Or start with the Witches and start with Equal Rites, or better yet start with Wyrd Sisters.

It's complicated, but each novel is basically free-standing plot-wise, it's just that the situation and the characters complicate over time, so starting earlier is probably better...