Audiobooks I've Enjoyed

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompts asks which audiobooks reviewers have enjoyed.

I haven't, really. 

I like the idea that the technology now exists to allow people who can't see books to have computers read books to them. Any book they want to hear...at least until the computer "updates" and won't read the book they left off "reading" last month, any more.

I, personally, prefer to read books the good oldfashioned way. I read a lot of books online these days, but I greatly prefer printed books.

There was a time, before publishers almost automatically released audiobook versions of everything and if the publishers didn't bother to hire readers your computer would read almost any book aloud for you, when blind people had to recruit friends to read books on tape for them. I read a few books onto tape for my father and his blind friends. Their tastes were surprisingly compatible with mine.

They always said that the existing library of books-on-tape for blind people contained too many bestselling novels. They wanted more nonfiction--history, biography, travel, health news, the books that grew out of breaking news stories. Regretfully they said that although charts and numbers were good in serious nonfiction books, they made boring tapes. They liked books that were funny and informative. They liked sound effects and hated when the author relied on pictures or visual effects to convey information. Most of them had liked reading once, and had liked Readers Digest as a guide to further reading. (They'd agree with those who said that Readers Digest was bland and superficial, but they appreciated its monthly selections of a bland, superficial first story about something people might or might not want to learn more about, every day.) Cleveland Amory's Ranch of Dreams was one book, new at the time, that I enjoyed reading and they enjoyed hearing. 

(Does listening to an audiobook count as reading? some ask. I say, if people are seriously studying something and listen to audiobooks while they commute, exercise, even eat, until they can recite the information along with the reader, that counts as reading. If they listen to audiobooks as background noise, shout conversations over the recorded voices, fall asleep with the narrators running on, that counts as, well, who's never fallen asleep over a book? The question is whether people get information or insight or entertainment out of audiobooks. Obviously they do. But most people who are not blind or severely dyslexic can get the information or insight or entertainment more efficiently out of real books.)