I listen to things as I work, and sometimes that's podcasts, sometimes it's audiobooks. Looking for suggestions on audiobooks, preferably fiction. Sci-fi, fantasy, urban fantasy, but anything goes. Bonus points for long, consistently good series since, as mentioned, I listen to it daily as I work, so we're talking dozens of hours per week.
What does everyone like and recommend? Thanks.
Hope everyone is having a good weekend, too!
The Dresden Files series is narrated by James Marsters and he does a DAMN good job at it. I have all of them, well worth the time.
Thanks!
I've already read/listened to that like three times at least. You're right, though. Fucking good shit. Dresden Files and MHI are both excellent in the urban fantasy genre.
In which case I recommend another of my favorites, The Saxon Tales by Bernard Cornwell. Can't remember off the top of my head who narrates it but I enjoyed the whole thing of those as well.
Jonathan Keeble is the best, but he drops off pretty early. Bounces around a few narrators until Matt Barnes takes over and ends the series really strong.
An awesome series. I still think Bob should be an angry New Yorker, but I can understand the weird British one.
The Dresden Files revolves around an abusive relationship between Harry Dresden and Karrin Murphy.
Murphy knows for a fact that Harry is a mage who can say things to cause rooms to explode and people to die. She keeps insisting on absolute transparency from Harry, and when he withholds information to protect her life, she gaslights him into admitting that he is an abuser.
Murphy keeps leading Harry on and using him fucking ruthlessly to play cop regarding supernatural forces that she is utterly unequipped to even understand, all the while gaslighting the fuck out of him.
As a survivor of an abusive relationship with a ruthless narcist who used police and the law to further abuse me, this whole book was toxic fucking sludge.
The author doesn't even acknowledge what is happening and the fan base can't suck Murphy's cock hard enough.
It gets worse in the following books.
You have been warned.
This is not accurate to the series in my opinion. To anyone who hasn't read it yet I'll try to avoid spoilers.
The core dichotomy in the series is the distinction between people who have a clue, and normies. The supernatural community has a sort of Geneva Conventions of their own, and a core rule of it involves keeping normies ignorant or scared.
Harry flouts this by placing himself in the yellow pages. He's spent most of his adult life butting heads with the idea of keeping normies in the dark, but even he himself understands that some of this crap is secret for a reason. The supernatural world of the series is one consisting of about 5% relatively benevolent beings, 20% creatures who consider humans a nuisance, and 75% predators.
Case in point, vampire groupies. In the series people who find out that vampires are real frequently try to make contact with them because they think it'd be cool, and end up as food. More than once in the series, people who Harry helped by giving them some knowledge of the supernatural end up killing themselves with it. In one of the books it is brought up that it is completely possible to learn dark magic without having any natural talent at magic at all.
Harry himself is effectively a paroled murderer. In his past he killed his old master with magic, claimed self defense and got off on a technicality. The series explains in the post Dead Beat arc that 99 times out of a hundred the governing body of wizards just executes you for this on the spot.
This combines into his attitude towards Murphy. Who, and I'll agree with you here, is worst girl and it's not even close. Hell I'd take a couple of the one off side girls over her.
Dresden is on the books for Chicago PD as a psychic consultant, something which is pretty much paying his bills in large part. As a ranking wizard he essentially is psychic anyway.
Murphy's character starts out as a normie and represents the emergence into having a clue. She doesn't understand the rules and regulations of the supernatural order, the real world behind the facade, and wants to bend them to modern day mortal law rather than accept the truth of reality. Which eventually she does, at the cost of her job, position and reputation.
Each of them condescends towards the other. Reality condescends to the facade and the facade to reality. Same behavior, but only one of them is right.
That's the underlying theme of the books. At least the first arc of the series anyway. Willful ignorance.
Murphy started out as a shit character, kind of got better and more tolerable, and then went back to getting worse by the end. She peaked right around the time of the motorcycle jousting ride, and then it was a downhill slide from there. The shit she pulled with her self-appointed ownership of the Swords was absolutely insufferable. She has some endearing qualities and moments, and a lot of a really awful qualities and moments too. But she never really gets called out on the shit ones. She never has that moment of her attitude biting her in the ass and having to own up to being arrogant and condescending. That's what bothered me most about her to be honest.
I think this is a fair take. And, yeah, that her bad behavior is never acknowledged, she isn't called out, and she doesn't really learn and grow is probably the worst part, I agree. I'd say she gets pretty decent, and definitely has her good qualities, but in the first book or two it's true she's largely shit.
I think this misrepresents things a bit. His master summoned one of the worst beings in existence for the express purpose of hunting him down and killing him. And at this point, Harry has no idea about the existence of the wider magical world; he’s not going to be able to get help from the White Council or anything. There’s no “technicality” there—Harry really didn’t have other choices.
Now, I also understand why the council was (is) edgy about him, both because of the way using magic to kill can corrupt you and because of essentially all of his actions since then. But to suggest that killing his master was anything less than a legitimate necessity in the moment is unfair.
True but the Council didn't know that or believe him, and I was trying to avoid spoilers so I kept it succinct.
Fair.
The first book ends ... well you know how. So he is two for two.
The White Council was no help at any point; even when fully aware of the stakes.
The fist book begins with Murphy investigating a crime scene where she knows for a fact that the murderer used magic to cause the victim to die in horrific and spectacular way.
Later, when Dresden doesn't share magical secrets with her, she gaslights him about how badly hurt she is; then tries to fucking pin him as the murderer. "I can't trust you Harry. Perhaps you killed him!"
She is an abusive, insufferable cunt. She uses her position as detective and control of his access to wages to leverage Dresden, all while pretending that she a victim.
Harry yums it up, and half of his internal monolog is about how everything is his fault.
The book has redeeming qualities, but it is unforgivable that the author doesn't even acknowledge what Murphy is doing, and never, ever will.
I bet a shiny dollar that she is going to get a supernatural ascension or some such later in the series due to Murphy being a fan favorite.
You are not wrong about Murphy being a pretty shit person and borderline abusive. You are wrong that the "series revolves around it". She is a main character, but the series revolves around Harry and he is the driving force behind all of the stories. I get the feeling you probably read the first two books, which are universally acknowledged as the worst in the series, and then gave up. For the rest of the series, Murphy gets slightly better in some ways, and doesn't in others. But everything else does get way better.
Perhaps I overstated things. Dresden and Murphy's relationship is certainly the central relationship in the first book. She is a major character in the series.
I liked Wayne June's (Darkest Dungeon narrator) narration of the H.P. Lovecraft books.
Hell yeah. I think I've heard one or two of those.
Thanks.
I can't do most fiction audiobooks because the voices they do for the characters annoys the shit out of me.
Lord of the Rings / Silmirillion / The Hobbit, a ton of HP Lovecrafts works, the Bible all are free audiobooks in playlists on YouTube.
Edit: just typing Audiobook into YouTube comes up with tons. I was amazed.
That's a really good one, thanks. Tolkien was some of the earlier stuff I read, but I don't think I've ever listened to an audio book.
Do you have a preference for narrator?
The Bible is also an interesting suggestion, and the same question applies; do you have a version you suggest?
For Lord of the Rings my favourite ones are narrated by Rob Inglis.
Rob Inglis is the gold standard. Serkis is good, but Inglis is great.
The most recent one by Andy serkis (gollum)
I don't do audio books, but James Earl Jones has done a full auidobook of the Bible. I'm not sure that can be topped.
The hitchhikers guide to the universe or the dirk gently holistic detective agency books by Douglas Addams, even better if you can get his narration of them
Seconded. Here's a copy on youtube. Best download it because Adams' narration is in some sort of copyright limbo, not available, and various rights holding parties are playing whack-a-mole when copies popup on the internet.
I've always suggested WWZ for an audiobook. Max Brooks is the narrator and has a bunch of actors for the other characters. Mark Hammel plays the soldier who survived the Battle of Yonkers
I'll check it out, thanks!
Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series is narrated by Michael Prichard. The books are great and Prichard does a great job narrating them.
Eoin Colfer‘s Artemis Fowl series is narrated by Nathaniel Parker, who does the thing of giving each character their own voice. Either the last book or the next-to-last book was originally narrated by someone different, which absolutely ruined it. They went back and re-did it with Parker, but the damage was already done for me.
Been meaning to check these out, thanks for the reminder.
For a double-shot of Wolfe, look for the A&E series starring Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin. I can’t picture those characters without seeing them.
Nero Wolf is arguably the best detective series of all time.
RC Bray did starship troopers this past year. Galaxies edge is phenomenal. Watchers by koontz and fear nothing/ seize the night are solid. Redwall on audiobook is well done. If you like gothic horror at all Micheal McDowell has a few books that are a good listen.
The Thrawn trilogy by Zahn has audiobooks with production values that verge on radio plays. I'd look into pirating them, though. The price is a joke.
It's been a very long time since I listened to it but I remember the first X-Wing Series audiobook was also done really well.
I never read those past the first. If there are audiobooks, I might have to look into them.
I've got three sci-fi recommendations.
The Frontlines series by Marko Kloos. Kloos is an old regular of the Firing Line and High Road gun forums, around the same time as Larry Correia, so he's pretty based. Frontlines is a bit of a mix between Starship Troopers, Halo ODSTs, and Judge Dredd. Set in a mild dystopian future where earth's nations have coalesced into roughly 3 factions, the North American Commonwealth, the Sino-Russian Alliance, and basically everyone else. Most citizens live in Mega City style slums with soy based food rations and comblock housing. One way to get out of that life is to join the military. The protagonist does so, and there is a pretty entertaining basic training sequence similar to Starship Troopers. The worldbuilding of the series is really good in my opinion, especially in relation to the military stuff. Wormhole based FTL has been achieved and humans have terraformed and colonized many different worlds, and the war between the NAC and SRA is mostly taking place out there, since neither side wants to nuke Earth, so they fight proxy wars on backwater worlds. The bulk of the series is actually about an alien threat they encounter that begins to wage war on humanity, but the series does a great job of taking its time setting things up. The whole first book doesn't even involve aliens for like 95% of its run. It's basically about the protagonist getting some war experience on earth fighting rebels and rioters in the Dredd style Mega Cities. Shit happens and he finally gets to go to space, and that's where they alien stuff starts. If you saw the Love, Death, and Robots episode Lucky 13, that episode was written by Kloos and is actually a short story within the Frontline universe. Though in typical Netflix fashion, the actual character in Lucky 13 is a hot White chick pilot, not a strong black woman. The series is finished if that's a concern, though there is a spinoff in progress as well.
Second series is The Eden Chronicles by S.M. Anderson. Sort of a Ayn Rand meets Sliders deal. Earth has basically fallen to the globalist commie forces and the US government starts taking a very hardline tyrannical approach to basically everything. Full communism, assigned jobs, slave labor camps, etc. A small group of John Galt/Francisco D'Anconia types who are all experts in their fields predicted this would happen decades ago and began an escape plan. The physicist of the bunch found a way to teleport to alternate adjacent dimensions of Earth, and found one that never saw the rise of the human species, so it's basically a pristine empty wilderness earth. The group then spent the next few decades slowly building a large mass of followers and resources from like minded people via social networking, who were willing to uplift their lives and go to the new earth, Eden, to start fresh with a very conservatarian individualist political system. Stuff happens that complicates everyone getting there, but once they do, they find out that there is more than one alternate earth, and the other one has a very militant one-world-government that also knows how to traverse to other earths, except their technology is roughly on the level of the early to mid 1800s. So there's a lot of 'inferior but numerically superior vs. advanced but small numbers' sci-fi action stuff going on. And yes, why they are at 1800s tech but know how to get to other earths is explained in a pretty interesting way. This one is also finished, and the last book released not too long ago, so I actually haven't listened to it yet.
Last series is Undying Mercenaries by B.V Larson. This one is a lot more schlocky and pulpy than the others, but it's fun. It's basically a retelling of the fall of the Roman Empire, but from the perspective of the barbarians. Except the Roman Empire is a vast galactic empire of aliens, and the barbarians are humans. Every species in the empire is expected to contribute one specific product or service to the empire. Most species are too haughty or 'evolved' to be much good at violence anymore, so the service that humans get selected for after earth gets forcibly annexed is being soldiers because we're really good at it. We have to get flown to other planets by another species, since we're not allowed to have our own ships (that's a service a different species has to contribute), but humans are used as the army of the empire to conquer even more worlds. And there is a technology that allows someone's entire brain to be scanned and implanted into a clone upon death, so every time a human soldier is killed in combat, they wake up in clone pod, hence the undying part. The series is about humans slowly gaining more influence and power as the alien galactic empire is collapsing from internal cultural and political rot. Tons of over the top sci-fi action, main character is a bit of a Kirk with getting to bang a new chick pretty much every volume, but it's a fun high stakes in a comic book way silly sci-fi action and drama fest. If Frontlines is a lot like Starship Troopers the novel, Undying Mercenaries is a lot like Starship Troopers the movie, at least in terms of tone and feel. 22 books in and it's not finished yet.
All are available on audiobook.I recommend them in the same order I listed them. Frontlines is my favorite, Eden Chronicles is just under it, and Undying Mercenaries is fun but not really that thought provoking.
Thanks, those all look great!
I've seen Frontlines brought up in a positive light a few times now, so that's definitely going on the list.
Stormlight Archives are pretty good and yes it's incredibly long. I don't do audiobooks myself though.
Edit: sorry, Stormlight audiobooks are pretty good, but I wrote a bunch about my dislike of the latest books too. Purged any real spoilers. Despite my complaints, Sanderson's books fits OP's bill and are better than most Fantasy options out there today.
Good recommendation in terms of quality audiobooks, but I just want to complain about the Stormlight Archives because I just finished books 4&5 via audiobooks after reading the first 3 on paper, and I feel Sanderson has lost the plot. Sanderson got real weird after Covid.
Maybe it was me, because I had a long gap between reading book 3 and coming back to the series, but books 4&5 have all sorts of themes about social progressivism and science that I don't recall in the first three books (aside from one character's atheism). That's fine, all these things should be a source of interesting story telling, but every damn case that Sanderson writes involves a character on a world distant in time and place coming to the Reader's 21st century American ideas and treating it as novel within the context of the story. Hell, Sanderson literally broke he fourth wall to do this in book 5. There was a clear point where I can tell hat Sanderson watched pop science videos on youtube and tried to work in things he didn't understand into his worldbuilding including a certain character going on about the "conservation of [relevant magic system]"; thermodynamics took centuries of literal geniuses to work out and Sanderson has one charter mention it in passing?
Unfortunately I've come across that kind of writing so often in fiction that I basically learned to take it in stride. It's very hard to find a series that doesn't eventually involve self-insert / Mary Sue characters, or trying to wax poetic about how the series is a mirror to the real world (as the author sees it (I personally blame Star Trek for that one, it's always been woven into the fabric of the franchise)), or the author comes across as just smelling their own farts a little too much.
Even Orson Scott Card did that shit, I found most of the Ender's Game novels to be incurious trash.
Rama is probably one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written and ended up weird as hell (though Arthur C. Clark had nothing to do with the books past Rama 2).
Kingkiller Chronicles is insanely overrated, it's literally "adventures of man who can do everything" and tries to hide behind 'unreliable narrator' to explain it.
The character Lift in Stormlight is definitely a 'smelling your own farts' moment. Nobody fucking likes Lift. She uses anachronistic language and feels like someone told him "hey it'd be great if you wrote a character that exclusively appeals to 40 year old fat girls who were really big fans of Invader Zim".
The BBC's audio play of I, Claudius is INCREDIBLE. Done back when Radio4 wasn't a woke nightmare and every single scene is perfectly done. It's on Audible. Around 8 hours of listening. You won't regret it.
https://www.audible.com/pd/I-Claudius-Dramatised-Audiobook/B007MPI5BM
Not recommended mars trilogy
Two books by Philip K. Dick - "Ubik" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series narrated by Patrick Tull (17 books, 15-20hr apiece). Not a long series (about 50 hours in all), but worth the time: Wolfe's Book of the New Sun narrated by Jonathan Davis. I haven't listened to Audible's Wheel of Time recordings, but in total it must be hundreds of hours, and Reading and Kramer have been doing fantasy narration for decades
Star Wars novels pre-2000. Narrated by Anthony Daniels (C-3PO). Regardless of what you pick, you'd still be 90% likely to get something that doesn't suck.
The Helsreach audiobook is fantastic. So much so that it was made into one of the best fan movies ever created.
Anansi Boys is one of my all time favorite audiobooks. It's about a guy finding out his Dad is Anansi the God Spider while living in England and moving back and forth from Florida to the Caribbean islands to find answers.
The Children of Huron is a very sad but excellent book by Tolkien and read by Christopher Lee. Andy Serkis read thr Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
The dream Park series is quite fun.
If you can get over the reddity/geek & sundry -esque cringe to the whole performance, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinneman is a surprisingly good listen. 'LitRPG' is what the kids call the genre, I believe... Basically a dungeon game/isekai-esque scenario with a Douglas Adams/Pratchett-adjacent tone - considerably less tongue in cheek than those authors but with the same kind of slightly ludicrous world setting used as a backdrop for more serious character moments. The setting boils down to sci fi since the starting premise is essentially Hitchhiker's Guide, but rather than turning Earth into a hyperspace bypass, aliens turn earth into a dungeon survival reality show instead. However the dungeon in the story is so vast and flexible it may as well be an isekai too.
A friend sent me their copies and I listened grudgingly, because I'm mostly allergic to anything that smells of video gameplay systems in story form - isekais, quest-based adventures and such, basically all modern anime. Around the end of book 2 I was having to ditch the idea that I was listening grudgingly or annoyed by the tropes or the hit-or-cringe voicing any more. Instead I was consistently entertained by the high stakes buildup and payoffs in the absurd scenarios that the dungeon keeps spewing out. There's 7 books out now with around 20-30h of listening in each.
If you like British humour, I recommend the in-character autobiographies of Alan Partridge, written and voiced by Steve Coogan: 'I, Partridge', 'Nomad' and 'Big Beacon'. Matt Berry has done a similar book from the perspective of his character Stephen Toast from the series Toast of London: 'Toast on Toast: Cautionary tales and candid advice'. It's a touch more surreal and absurd than the Partridge ones, but if you've seen the show you'll know what to expect. If you haven't, it's a kind of absurdist parody/satire about British actors, on a similar level to Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
For scifi I really enjoyed the eisenhorn and helsreach audio books, but I do have some experience with 40k. If you don't they'll probably be confusing.
Or the Bobiverse though I dislike the 4th book.
For science fantasy ish. 12 miles below is quite good imo.
Add Ciaphus Cain series and gaunts ghosts series
I did all of Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Saga(Arthurian legend) and the Saxon Chronicles (The Last Kingdom on netflix).
Highly recommend both series. Saxon Chronicles will keep you busy a while with 13 books. I was sad they are over...struggling to find my next series. Eagles of the Empire hasn't sucked me in like I had hoped.
I have a nice abridged version of Master and Commander on 4 CDs, read by Robert Hardy, very good. I've been meaning to look for an unabridged. I have Andy Serkis reading The Hobbit, several CDs I forget how many. Its alright but mostly another excuse for him to do Gollum again. I listened to Harry Potter, all of them, read by Stephen Fry. Very long.
As a child I liked the Jedi Academy trilogy on tape (yeah cassette tape). Only 4 sides each, abridged. I really should find it again. I had a nice version of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Now I am reminded I also had a BBC radio drama version of The Hobbit too. I had a couple of Roald Dahl books on tape, one of which might have been read by him.