If you’ve been around for more than a few days, you know that I’m a regular listener of audiobooks. In fact, I have a membership/subscription at Audible.com, I listen to so many. I even chose to experience my first Stephen King book, Under the Dome, as an audiobook rather than in text, because I enjoy them so much (it’s just over 35 hours long!). It made a great traveling companion on my trip to and from Hot Springs to visit my parents over the long holiday weekend.

I started listening to books-on-tape more than seventeen years ago—the first time was when I drove from Northern Virginia, where I was living at the time, to Nashville for a job interview and to apartment hunt. The public library system in NoVA had, even then, a HUGE selection of books-on-tape because so many people up there have quite long commutes (at one point, I was commuting almost an hour and a half to work at a job in downtown DC) and, either sitting in traffic in their cars or on the Metro, listening to a book-on-tape helped make that commute a little more tolerable. I don’t necessarily remember in what order I checked them out, but the first three books I listened to were Dances with Wolves by Michael Blake (who then turned it into the screenplay for the Kevin Costner movie), John Grisham’s The Firm, and an abridged version of Catherine Marshall’s Christy, read by Kellie Martin (the show had just gone off the air). Those books made the ten hour drive between Chantilly, Virginia, and Nashville—which I was making almost every weekend the first month, as my relocation was somewhat piecemeal—go by so much faster! (Since then, I’ve downloaded the unabridged version of Christy.)

My next big audiobook purchases were all six of Jane Austen’s novels, Little Women, and a bunch of novels in the Star Wars expanded universe. When audiobooks started coming out on CD, I was sold! The only problem was changing them in and out safely in the car.

In 2005, I downloaded my first book from Audible—it was Janet Evanovich’s One for the Money (an assigned genre read for grad school), and I had to burn it to CD because I didn’t have an MP3 player. And that, as we say, was that. I was hooked. I started researching MP3 players, because it had to be better to do that than to keep burning CDs. So I bought one. But even still, there was one series I had to buy on CD—and that’s the Harry Potter series. I have the entire unabridged audiobook of each of the seven books. But I didn’t listen to them as CDs. I ripped them to the computer and made my own digital audiobooks of them.

And it was the narrator of the Harry Potter books, Jim Dale, who turned me into an extremely picky consumer of audiobooks. I’m a narrator snob! I want readers who can make each character sound different, who gives enough tonal difference between male and female characters, it’s easy to tell them apart. And who can do accents, drama, and humor.

Of course, no one will ever equal Jim Dale—nor should anyone ever try!—but I do have a few other favorites. Charlotte Parry, who narrated Sandra Byrd’s To Die For and also voiced Catherine Howard in Philippa Gregory’s The Boleyn Inheritance is one of my favorites. Ashford McNabb, who was (up until book 5) reading the Maiden Lane series by Elizabeth Hoyt, is another favorite.

The narrator can make or break an audiobook. The reader they got for the fifth Elizabeth Hoyt/Maiden Lane book was so terrible that I almost couldn’t finish the book—and this is a series I’m hooked on! Then there’s the sound editing. I listened to another book this year in which the reader’s “mouth noises” and swallowing were so prominent in the recording that I could listen only for short periods before I was so grossed out that I had to turn it off.

The reader for Under the Dome is good—though he has a tendency to make the characters who are supposed to have a “posh” Maine accent sound they’re from rural Georgia, and a French character sounds like a bad parody of a deep-bayou Cajun accent. But, that aside, especially considering how many characters he’s having to voice, he’s doing a great job.

There are certain narrators I will not listen to, as well—though those are mostly based on personal preference on whether or not I enjoy the sound of the narrator’s voice or how he/she pronounces words or uses (or doesn’t use) inflection/tone/accent. I was highly disappointed after downloading the unabridged versions of all of Dee Henderson’s O’Malley series to discover the narrator was an older man who sounds like he’s smoked heavily all of his life. This was especially bad when he was trying to voice the female characters and the romantic scenes.

The nice thing about Audible—and what I make use of now when it’s a narrator I’m unfamiliar with—is the sample that you can listen to before committing to buying the book. And other listeners are pretty good, if they do leave a review, about reviewing both the narrator and the story, since each is so integral to the experience.

Do you listen to audiobooks?
Do you have a favorite reader?
Are there certain types of books you prefer to listen to?
When do you listen to audiobooks?
How do you listen to audiobooks (an iPod/MP3, your phone, tape/CD, etc.)?
What’s been your overall experience with audiobooks?