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!
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".