I’ve started listening to books on my commute.  I spend an hour each day in my car, and since apparently I am turning into a cranky old woman who complains about kids and their crazy music, I have lost patience with the radio.  Luckily for me, my library has an impressive collection of books on CD so I can find something new to listen to every week.fantasy and science fiction book reviews

As I’ve dipped my toe into this new medium for enjoying fantasy, I’ve discovered that just like there are good authors, there are also good readers.  Jim Dale is amazing.  Famous for being the voice on the Harry Potter recordings, I thoroughly enjoyed his reading of Stoneheart by Charlie Fletcher. Surprisingly, however, I didn’t enjoy Kenneth Branaugh’s take on The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis.  Branaugh, who I adore as an actor, couldn’t turn off the theater training.  It felt like he was trying to read the book to a blind person on the back row of a Broadway theater.  And then I listened to The Capture, the first book in the Guardians of Ga’hoole series by Kathryn Lasky that is being turned into a movie this summer.  Or should I say I listened to the first 90 seconds of The Capture, because Pamela Garelick’s voice was so cloyingly sweet and full of wide-eyed innocence that I had to turn it off or I would have driven into the river in an attempt to put me out of my misery.

fantasy and science fiction book reviewsSo, dear readers, I have a question for you: Do you listen to audiobooks?  If so, why?  If not, why not? And which readers would you recommend, either to seek out or to avoid like the plague?

Leave a comment and we’ll enter you in a drawing to win an audiobook of Andre Nortons classic Witch World.

Author

  • Ruth Arnell

    RUTH ARNELL (on FanLit's staff January 2009 — August 2013) earned a Ph.D. in political science and is a college professor in Idaho. From a young age she has maxed out her library card the way some people do credit cards. Ruth started reading fantasy with A Wrinkle in Time and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — books that still occupy an honored spot on her bookshelf today. Ruth and her husband have a young son, but their house is actually presided over by a flame-point Siamese who answers, sometimes, to the name of Griffon.