Five (Plus Five) Favorite Audible Narrators

When I’m talking with friends about a book I enjoyed, I sometimes catch myself sheepishly confessing, “Well, I listened to it,” as if listening didn’t count as reading.

I still believe that reading a printed copy of a book, pen in hand, is the most satisfying and enriching reading experience and that reading a book twice is vastly preferable to reading it once. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to enjoy reading. Listening to a gifted narrator can open previously unnoticed dimensions to a book, right along with reading and marking a printed or digital edition).

An interview on Volume 140 of The Mars Hill Audio Journal expanded my thinking about it.

In discussing The Untold Story of the Talking Book, historian Matthew Rubery reveals that only with the growth of audiobook sales in the 1980’s and 90’s (“books on tape” back then) came criticism from some readers who believed that books were entirely meant to be “silent exchanges between an author and a solitary reader, requiring the mediation of a printed book in one’s hands.”

In fact, reading aloud was more common in the 19th century than it is today, and nobody seems to have thought people hadn’t “read” a book if they only listened to it.

There are specific pleasures and gains to be had with different kinds of reading and as I’ve shared in Boost Your Reading Life This Year with these Five Tips, audiobooks are one of my favorite ways to increase the number of books I’m able to enjoy in a year.

But as all audiobook fans know, a monotonous narrator can kill a book, while a lively narrator, invested in the content and characters, can bring it to life and seal it in memory.

As summer sulters on, perhaps you’re looking for an audiobook to accompany your exercise, gardening or yard work. Or maybe you’re looking for a fun shared listen for a family road trip.

Having just completed two books with absolutely wonderful narrators, I’m here to share five audiobooks (plus five more) where, to my ear at least, the narrator’s voice and the printed page seemed perfectly paired.

Andy Serkis: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

A recommendation from my son, who, like me, had already listened to previous audio editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. “Actors are the best narrators,” he commented. He added that Serkis created distinct voices for all the characters in the book.

Sure enough, Serkis, who plays Gollum in Peter the Jackson films, raises audiobook narration to a whole other level with his performance of The Hobbit and he went on to record The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion as well, doing all 132 voices. Listening to Serkis read The Hobbit, I found myself weeding the garden and cleaning house a little longer than usual, just to stay plugged in to that story and that voice (or, I should say, those voices).

Serkis (The Batman II, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Episode VII – The Force Awakens), told Late Show host Stephen Colbert that the idea began when he decided to stream a live, 11 hour reading of The Hobbit during the COVID lockdown of 2020. Here’s a taste of his range:

So far I’ve only listened to The Hobbit, but the next time I want to revisit Middle Earth, I’ll head to Audible, where Serkis’ editions of the other Tolkien novels are on my list.

Sissy Spacek: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

I learned from my son’s Hobbit recommendation that when looking for a well-narrated audiobook, if the narrator is one of our finest actors, it’s a good bet you won’t be disappointed.

The opening line of Sissy Spacek’s bio reveals the perfection of her fit for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “As a kid,” it begins, “Sissy Spacek climbed trees, rode horses, swam, and played in the woods” in her native Quitman, Texas. Spacek (Badlands, Carrie, Coal Miner’s Daughter) lends that childhood sense of adventure to the voice of Scout, otherwise known as Jean Louise Finch, the young narrator of this American classic.

Scout’s naivete as narrator is essential to the novel, an intensely painful story of racism in the Jim Crow South. Spacek is completely believable as the tomboyish first grader describing the mystery of Boo Radley and voicing her confusion about the racism in her community when Atticus, her lawyer father, is appointed to defend a black man against a charge of rape. The child’s innocence (“What’s rape?”) allows us to see (and see through) each person in Maycomb’s small-town collection of the clear-eyed but helpless and the blindly hypocritical.

Timely, tender and terrifying, To Kill a Mockingbird is a book to read and re-read, and Spacek’s voice makes the experience rich and revealing.

Daniel Nayeri: Everything Sad Is Untrue, Read by the Author

“All Persians are liars and lying is a sin. That’s what the kids in Mrs. Miller’s class think, but I’m the only Persian they’ve ever met, so I don’t know where they got that idea. My mom says it’s true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn’t. Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse.”

Magic carpet ride is more than a metaphor in Everything Sad Is Untrue, one of my Favorite Reads of 2023 (a New York Times and NPR Best Book of the year to boot). I began this one as an Audible and was captivated by Daniel Nayeri’s voice as his middle school self (he is, in fact, telling a fictionalized version of his own real life story). Like To Kill a Mockingbird, the narrator’s young voice in this novel charms us enough to provide some cushion when he reveals horrific details right along with middle school mistreatment. Everything Sad Is Untrue was so evocative, funny, and heartrending that I later bought the paperback to savor and mark.

The narrator’s mother escapes Iran, first because of a marital breakup which is bad enough, but then because she, an educated and devout Muslim doctor, has a religious conversion that could cost her and her children’s lives, forcing them to flee to the United States. She is the story’s hero, though Everything Sad is Untrue is her son Khosrou’s story. Nobody in his Oklahoma middle school can pronounce his name, so he becomes Daniel, whose tales of the wealthy family he left in Persia are (predictably) received by his peers with smirks and eyerolls. His family stories (and The Lord of the Rings, which he reads every evening) sustain Khrosou who reveals his pain in deft contrasts, like the fragrant saffron of his mother’s cooking compared to the ubiquitous Oklahoma BBQ in their adopted country.

This book is many things, among them a storyteller’s paradise and an ode to culture, food and mother love. Everything Sad Is Untrue reveals the ugly truth about the immigrant’s pain, the ostracizing ignorance of American adolescents, the grace of understanding teachers, the awkward friendships of middle school boys, the harsh reality of abusive stepfathers. It’s a book straight from the heart and it leaves a lasting mark in the reader’s.

Ruby Dee: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Legendary actress Ruby Dee lends her magnetic voice to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book with its own backstory of injustice and resilience.

Zora Neale Hurston’s cultural research and writing gave voice to the varied stories of 20th century American black women. Sadly, Their Eyes Were Watching God was dismissed by her male peers in the Harlem Renaissance, and Hurston died in such poverty that she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Alice Walker would revive Hurston’s reputation, finding her Florida gravesite and placing a gravestone for the author that reads: “Zora Neal Hurston: A Genius of the South.” Their Eyes Were Watching God was reprinted and sold 200,000 copies between 1978-1988. Its tenacious main character, Janie Mae Crawford, won the hearts of readers across the country.

Ruby Dee (Raisin in the Sun, American Gangster) possessed a strength much like the one Hurston reveals in Janie. Independent and searching, limited by the strictures of her time and place but always self-aware and selective, Janie grows to maturity through each tragic turn of events. We follow Janie from hopeful adolescence through volatile relationships with men. We witness her dignity in the face of her peers’ harsh judgment. Janie’s inviolable soul shines throughout this gripping book and Ruby Dee brings her to life with aching authenticity.

Paul Murray, O.P.’s Aquinas at Prayer: The Bible, Mysticism and Poetry Read by the Author

Though I do my best spiritual reading in the morning quiet with a cup of coffee, I bought the audio version of Father Paul Murray’s Aquinas at Prayer when a friend mentioned that the author himself was the narrator.

I already loved Murray’s soothing Irish brogue when I followed his Word on Fire Institute course “Prayer, Beauty, Mission: The Hidden Springs of the New Evangelization” and I knew this audiobook would stir my heart. Murray, an Irish Dominican priest and poet, dispenses spiritual wisdom and insight in a way that fills me with desire for a deeper life of love and prayer.

This book fill a gap in Aquinas scholarship, which has naturally focused on the Angelic Doctor’s carefully paced theological and philosophical reflection in the Summa Theologica, leading to the notion that the great scholastic was “all head and no heart.” Murray magnificently corrects the record, establishing that the scholastic saint in fact possessed a mystical heart in equal proportion to his famous theological head.

As Father Murray illuminates Aquinas’ lesser-known attention to the works of St. Paul and the Psalms in particular, I found my own heart soaring with fresh inspiration. He continues with a discussion of poetry’s efficacy and limitations in expressing the theological mysteries Aquinas so thoroughly explored in his prose. Then he leads the reader through St. Thomas’ exquisite Corpus Christi cycle…making this a book I later purchased in print, to read and ponder in the silence of morning, with Murray’s gentle voice returning in memory to calm my soul.

Haven’t found one to fit your fancy? Here are five more, just in case.

Jeremy Irons: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. You may have watched Irons play the erudite, searching Charles Ryder in the PBS series based (quite faithfully) on the book. He brings all that lonely wonder to this narration.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Read by the Author. Tyson leads us through the basics of astrophysics in his trademark fun, flamboyant style. At times pushy on interpretive points perhaps better left to philosophers and theologians, he nonetheless provides a good grounding for pondering the origins of the universe while acknowledging that even now what we don’t know about the universe is far greater than what we do.
Johnny Rey Diaz: Victor Villaseñor’s Rain of Gold. Johnny Rey Diaz (Grey’s Anatomy, Bosch, NCIS) narrates Rain of Gold, the biographical novel about Villaseñor’s family in the time when his parents escaped the Mexican Revolution by coming to America only to face hard farm labor, language barriers and racism. Villaseñor never leaves his readers without hope. Unspeakable pain is faced with dignity, pride and an unbreakable spirit.
Bronson Pinchot, Karen White, Mark Bramhall and Lorna Raver: Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, a collection of the author’s short stories. Whenever friends tell me that they want to “get” Flannery O’Connor but are having trouble “getting into” her fiction, I recommend this collection as well as the audiobook A Good Man Is Hard to Find because the narration of these classic stories easily situates them in O’Connor’s South. These voices interpret well O’Connor’s irony and humor and that opens up our imagination to the occasions of grace on offer in her gritty world.
Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Audio Collection Read by the Author. Lobel himself reads his classic Frog and Toad stories with delightful accompanying sound effects. Of course you’ll want to read the illustrated books with your children, but a road trip with this narration makes the miles go by joyfully.

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Several of the above books have been discussed on my favorite literary podcast. See Go and Be Human with Close Reads: A Podcast for the Incurable Reader for more. You might also enjoy The Mars Hill Audio Journal: Where All Things Considered Meets God, another of my favorite sources of book discovery. There’s a new and improved website in the works at Mars Hill Audio, and this preview begins with a montage of book covers from many past episodes to give you a taste of its offerings.