At a recent book club meeting, a friend asked the rest of the group for audiobook recommendations. She’d just gotten a new job (yay!) with a much longer commute (yuck), and she was looking for audiobooks to make the commute more enjoyable. I’m afraid many of us audiobook fans fired recommendations at her faster than she could write them down, so I ended up typing mine up for her afterward, and figured I’d share them here as well.

I’ve already mentioned specific books and narrators before, including Rebecca Lowman, Jim Dale, Morven Christie, and Kate Rudd, but here’s a slightly longer list, reflecting another half-year of reading/listening. Young Adult fiction is overrepresented here, because I usually choose shorter books for my relatively short commute.

Talented narrators matched with great books

• The incomparable Jim Dale reads the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, as well as The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. All are magical.
• Rebecca Lowman reads everything by Rainbow Rowell (Eleanor & Park, Fangirl, Landline) and Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. It occurs to me that I am bad at describing voices and can’t properly convey why Rebecca Lowman is so incredible, but trust me on this one.
• Morven Christie performs upper-class Scottish “Queenie’s” half of Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, and narrates Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, which is set in Iceland.
• David Tennant – you might know him as the Tenth Doctor, or the star of British miniseries Broadchurch – performs My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher. If Scottish accents (and heartbreakingly good realistic YA fiction) are your thing, don’t miss this one.
• Alex McKenna reads Every Day by David Levithan. This unique story requires a special narrator: the main character, A, wakes up every day in a different body, and doesn’t identify as one gender or another. McKenna’s grainy voice is perfect.
• If I Stay and Where She Went, a pair of novels by Gayle Forman, have two different narrators; Kirsten Potter is Mia in the first book, and Dan Bittner is Adam in the latter. The narrators are well suited to the stories.
• I’m a sucker for British accents (and Scottish ones, obviously), and John R. Lee does a fantastic performance of Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave. This was the first O’Farrell book I read/listened to, and I was a little disappointed that Lee didn’t read her other titles as well. (Anne Flosnik reads The Hand That First Held Mine and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. She does a fine job, and I’m a huge Maggie O’Farrell fan, so I recommend these as well, but Heatwave was exceptional.)
• As I’ve mentioned before, Kate Rudd reads The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Here is a case where the book is incredible on its own, but the audio version somehow manages to add even more depth, emotion, and humor.
• I’ve encountered A.S. King almost exclusively in audio, and all of the readers do justice to her brilliant, slightly surreal yet grounded young adult fiction. Lynde Houck reads Please Ignore Vera Dietz, Kirby Heyborne reads Everybody Sees the Ants, Michael Stellman reads Reality Boy, and Devon Sorvari reads Ask the Passengers.

Authors who read their own books

• Young adult author Sara Zarr reads several of her own books, including Sweethearts, Story of a Girl, Once Was Lost, and The Lucy Variations. Don’t judge these books by their covers – full of realistic and intense teen problems, they’re far from fluff.
• Genre-defying Neil Gaiman performs most (all?) of his own books, and his voice is perfectly suited to his stories. Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Neverwhere, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Stardust…
• Philip Pullman and a full cast read Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass/The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass). I don’t want to say they bring the book to life, because it lives and breathes spectacularly on the page, but they bring the book into the dimension of sound such that each character’s voice is exactly the way I heard it in my head while I was reading.
• I wasn’t sure if I was going to like Cheryl Strayed’s collected advice columns, but I was utterly hooked after Steve Almond’s introduction. Strayed reads Tiny Beautiful Things: advice on love and life from Dear Sugar, and because many of her stories and anecdotes are personal, it feels like she’s speaking directly to you.
• Sarah Vowell reads all her own books, including The Wordy Shipmates, Unfamiliar Fishes, Assassination Vacation, and The Partly Cloudy Patriot. Vowell – the voice of Violet Incredible – tends to polarize listeners; some love her voice, some really dislike it. Her audiobooks usually feature cameo performances from other voice actors, including Stephen Colbert and Seth Green.
• Though she doesn’t narrate her novels, Ann Patchett reads her nonfiction, including What Now? (based on her commencement address) and her recent book of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Ann is the writer to whom I wish I was related, or at least the one I’d most want for a next-door neighbor, and her writing is pure wisdom and humor and craft.
• Perhaps most popular of all in the author-reads-own-book category, Tina Fey performs Bossypants. I haven’t listened to this myself, but I’ve listened to enough friends rave about it that I feel I can recommend it.

So those are some of my favorites. What audiobooks do you like? Leave suggestions in the comments.