These audiobooks are not new titles, but they are enduring ones. They include the works that won me over to listening to my books, and each is especially noteworthy for what narration adds to the experience.
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White has recently earned its place on my list of favorite books of all time. It’s got, by far, the best villains; they are so dreadfully evil you almost want to throw the book down to harm them (luckily, with audio this isn’t an option). But there’s also an almost irresistible quality about them. With names such as Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, you just know they will be unforgettable. Collins was a contemporary, friend, and colleague of Charles Dickens, and this “sensation” novel is as gripping as any modern thriller. Ian Holm, one of Britain’s great actors (also: Bilbo!) reads it on audio with the perfect balance of gravity and arch humor.
Snowscape
The best-selling personal account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of Into the Wild. Written with emotional clarity and supported by his unimpeachable reporting, Krakauer's frank eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.
Angela’s Ashes is of course a masterpiece of memoir and you can easily conjure what Frank McCourt sounds like by reading the text on the page. But why not hear McCourt himself read it aloud? The late author had one of the great voices, was a storyteller who knew how to inject humor, emotion, pathos, and nuance into his voice, and he knew how to tell a story. I don’t think you can truly appreciate the story of his “miserable Irish childhood” as much in any other way as hearing McCourt tell it himself.
David Sedaris. Which book? Every book. Sedaris is brilliant, satanically hilarious, charming, a true original. All of his books work on the page. But as anyone who has seen Sedaris perform live or heard him on the radio or a podcast knows, you really need to hear him tell it yourself. Listen to his books even if you’ve already read them several times.
You may be a diehard Roald Dahl fan in print, but you can’t truly appreciate him until you hear him read his own stories on audio. There are many versions of his books on audio, but none of them are as wonderful as Dahl reading from The Roald Dahl Audio Collection. One caveat: The stories are sadly abridged in these versions. They are worth it anyway for the narrator, who reels off his gleefully nasty character descriptions and caustic dialogue in that distinctive Nordic-inflected British accent. Dahl’s renditions of Fantastic Mr. Fox and George’s Marvellous Medicine are especially delicious. His voice lowers to a whisper on occasion; he draws out certain sentences for emphasis; and at times, gets mumbly and almost breathless as he drives through an exciting exchange of dialogue. He knows not to cross certain lines: there is no whining or screeching, and no gratuitously “funny” voices. It’s very, very funny nonetheless.
My absolute favorite of all time for the entire family is E.B. White reading his own Charlotte’s Web. White drawls out the story in a plainspoken manner, with the kind of East Coast accent that hardly exists anymore. His telling is devoid of silliness (even when articulating various barnyard animals) or sentimentality. He is never cute or fussy or forced. Some highlights: His goose! His Templeton! And if you don’t get moist-eyed hearing his soft “goodbyes” as each baby spider takes flight near the end, then you simply have no heart. The overall effect is like listening in as the author, sitting on the porch of a house in Maine, perhaps his own, reads aloud to his grandkids. I have listened to it many times, and each time, I cry at the end when the baby spiders call out, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!”
