If you find a voice you like, you can find other books that person has narrated. Actor Jeremy Irons has narrated many good books and his voice is like sinking into a warm bath with a glass of brandy. Kirstin Mills has some suggestions.
I went on a holiday years ago that involved many hours of driving. Before we left, I headed to our local library to borrow cassette tapes of books to listen to in the car. The tapes not only helped pass the time after conversation ran out, one of them – a whodunnit – became quite addictive. We would rush through breakfast so we could get in the car to hear if the detective had figured out who the perp was. I cannot remember much about it now except that Hugh Laurie either narrated it or voiceacted in it.
I still love a good audiobook but thankfully we no longer rely on bulky tapes that were prone to breaking (and long books required lots of tapes). Nowadays, audiobooks are digital downloads.
So, where do you find audiobooks? There are many options. Both iTunes and Google Play have audiobooks in their stores. You can browse by category, look at the most popular audiobooks or search for specific titles or authors. You buy books as you go rather than paying a subscription. There are also subscription-based services where you pay a monthly fee and can download one or two books each month. Amazon’s Audible is perhaps the bestknown of these.
There are also ways to get audiobooks for free. I have the BorrowBox app which allows me to borrow audiobooks from my local library (you need to have a library membership to use the app). There is no cost and you can renew the book if you have not finished listening before the loan period expires.
Spotify also has audiobooks, but they are tricky to find (it has no audiobooks category). There are various websites that offer free audiobooks, but people report mixed success at using these on their devices (the place you will probably want to listen to audiobooks).
Whichever way you obtain an audiobook, I recommend using the “preview” button if one is available. I once plodded my way through an audiobook that had a narrator with a voice like nails down a blackboard. I would not have bought the book if I had previewed the audio first.
If you find a voice you like, you can find other books that person has narrated. Actor Jeremy Irons has narrated many good books and his voice is like sinking into a warm bath with a glass of brandy. His narration is a wonderful way to absorb classics like Brideshead Revisited, Lolita and Empire of the Sun. Writer Neil Gaiman has another perfect voice (I recommend The Ocean at the End of the Lane).
You can buy/borrow books in either unabridged or abridged form. If you listen to the unabridged version be aware that it can require many hours of listening. The first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring weighs in at more than 20 hours of listening. That is an extreme example because it is a long book, but even Margaret Atwood’s new book, The Testaments is more than 13 hours long. Still, I am never tempted to get an abridged version because I do not want to miss anything.
Audiobook players generally have options for listening at different speeds (so you can speed up if you are in a hurry), for skipping backward or forward (if you want to re-listen to something) and for a sleep timer so you can set it to play for a certain period if you’re listening in bed and are likely to drop off to sleep after a certain amount of time.
