Ask HN: Favorite audio book for long drives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Favorite audio book for long drives?

34 pointstmaly54 comments

What audio book have you enjoyed most on a long road trip?

This question is phrased weirdly because it's not like I listen to the same audiobook over and over every time I take a long drive. Presumably you're looking for "good book that worked well in audio format and is long enough to keep me occupied on a long drive".

I've been on road trips that lasted over a year. Some options that kept me stimulated:

* Most audio plays that target public radio (BBC, ZBS, etc). Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe, etc etc.

* Anything from the Teaching Co. Pick a subject that interests you, you won't be disappointed. If you don't know where to start, go with Robert Sapolsky's "Biology and Human Behavior".

* Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is worth calling out for length and breadth.

* High-budget podcasts. Not "a couple guys jabbering about how to cook" but the crafted ones. Serial is the obvious example, but there are a million more. This American Life. Planet Money. S*Town. The Agent. Darknet Diaries. If your podcast app is halfway decent, the discovery algorithm should keep you busy forever.

Sorry about that, yes I was looking for something that would work well for a road trip.

It’s not an audiobook, but if you’re a fan of history, particularly World War 1, then Dan Carlin’s six-part series “Blueprint for Armageddon” is fabulous. That’ll give you 20+ hours of content.

Carlin’s a self-proclaimed “non-historian”, but his storytelling is very compelling.

I can’t recommend this more. I’ve listened to all of his content and I always come back to this one. I’ve listened to it 3x over. It’s so engrossing.

If you like Dan Carlin, you'll also enjoy The Martyrmade Podcast. My favorite episodes are Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem.

My two favorites are the aforementioned WW1 one and the other one on the Pacific theater in WW2. I already knew almost everything he said in the WW1 one, whilst knowing almost nothing about the Pacific Theater one - both were super interesting.

  The Martian
  Ready Player One
  Project Hail Mary
  Name of the Wind
  Dresden Files
  Eye of the World (Wheel of Time)
  We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
  The Blade Itself (First Law Trilogy)
  Dungeon Crawler Carl
  The History of Ancient Egypt (Bob Brier lecture)
  Food: A Cultural Culinary History (Ken Albala lecture)

almost exactly my list, some excellent listens there

World War Z [0] by Max Brooks

it came out in 2006, when there was a bit of a fad of zombie-related content. most of it was pretty formulaic and predictable - there's a zombie apocalypse, there's a group of people struggling to survive, the story follows them.

World War Z broke out of the mold, taking the form of "an oral history of the zombie war". its conceit is that the narrator is a historian, going around the world to interview survivors and record their stories. each chapter takes the form of an interview with a different person, arranged more or less chronologically to follow the spread of the zombie outbreak.

this oral-history format lends itself really well to an audiobook with an ensemble cast. the author is the son of Mel Brooks, and he was able to use Hollywood connections to assemble an incredible cast [1].

there is also a film with the same name [2]. the film jumps right back into the predictable formula that the book so deftly escaped, and turns into "Brad Pitt saves the world from zombies". the two share no similarities beyond the name. it makes Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers look like a faithful adaptation of the source material in comparison.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z#Cast

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_(film)

I love listening to the Wheel of Time series read by Kate Reading and Michael Kramer

Over two hundred hours of story and amazing performances.

And for multiple short listens I’ve recently enjoyed biographies by Amy Poehler, Anna Kendrick, Nick Offerman and Tina Fey. I enjoy them because they are in an industry completely different to my own, and fabulously entertaining.

I'll always have a fondness in my heart for "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond, and I have always enjoyed "The Stand" by Stephen King although I think it requires being in a certain mood to listen to it. "Born a Crime" by Trevor Noah was really good, because I think he's a good storyteller, he has a good voice for narration, and just the right amount of "funny" without it being forced

Literally everything Richard Feynman ever put to voice, start with the audio version of his published works and move on to the Feynman Lectures.

Listend to all of them on my multiple coast to coast (USA) drives, and can't reccomend 'em highly enough.

The Bible. I find I often notice and muse upon different things when listening to it than when reading it.

Just assembled this audible.com list for a friend. These are all in the thriller/action genre. I can put one of these on for 10 hours while driving to our CT place and not even notice the trip.

Jack Reacher series by Lee Child

Gray Man series by Mark Greaney

Orphan X (Evan Smoak) series by Gregg Hurwitz

Gibson Vaughn series by Matthew FitzSimmons

“The Eiger Sanction” by Trevanian

Jonathan Ransom series by Christopher Reich

Simon Riske series by Christopher Reich

Mitch Rapp series by Vince Flynn, Kyle Mills

Any other by Christopher Reich

Tim Rackley series by Gregg Hurwitz

Any other Gregg Hurwitz books like “The Tower” (pretty brutal), “Tell No Lies”, “The Survivor”

“Armored” by Mark Greaney — the book (17-hour version), not the shortened pre-version

Anything else by Greaney, including the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan series

The Dewey Andreas series by Ben Coes

Peter Ash series by Nick Petrie

Case Lee series by Vince Milan

Nick Lawrence series by Brian Shea

“Darkness Falls” by Kyle Mills

Delta Force Novels by Dalton Fury

“City of Windows” by Robert Pobi

Anything by Michael Connelly (the author of the Harry Bosch series)

Sherlock Holmes narrated by Stephen Fry.

Length: 62 hrs and 52 mins

https://www.audible.com/pd/Sherlock-Holmes-Audiobook/B06WLMW...

The Harry Potter series (seven books) as well as all the Sherlock Holmes stories (three volumes). By the time I get through both, it's been years, and I can start again at the beginning. :)

The versions on audible have great readers IMO.

> as well as all the Sherlock Holmes stories (three volumes)

You may be interested to know Stephen Fry has done a 71 hour recording of all the Sherlock Holmes. He has an excellent voice for audiobooks.

The whole thing is a single item so if you're on Audible (for example) it's just one credit. And in a similar way to the ITV Jeremy Brett TV versions of Holmes, you get the whole canon of work with the same artistic vision.

Great to know, thank you.

I don't know that it is appropriate for a drive, exactly, but Anne Hathaway reading the Wizard of Oz is one of the best audio books I've ever listened to, period.

My only hesitation for a drive is that you might get too comfortable. It is like a loving mother reading to you while you're comfy in bed. She does different voices for the main characters, so she has her scarecrow voice and her Wicked Witch of the West voice. It is super underrated as I have never really heard anyone talk about it.

Not a specific book, but a process trick:

Any Kindle book can be read aloud by Alexa, via your phone. I don't want Alexa listening to me, so I just downloaded the app and didn't give any permissions (I don't remember what all it asked for).

Most library ebooks can be sent to your Kindle Cloud Library. So if you can borrow it, you can have Alexa read it out loud to you. If you want to adjust the playback speed, press the Alexa button within the app and say "Alexa, read faster|slower".

From the BBC their complete set of Raymond Chandler, their 1981 Lord of the Rings radio drama, and their Hobbit radio drama.

From elsewhere Martin Shaw also does an excellent Hobbit, plus a brilliant Silmarillion. The 2007 Dune narrated by Scott Brick (et al) is a really good edition, and Best Served Cold narrated by Steven Pacey is also a good listen.

The GULAG Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

It has only gotten more relevant with the resurgence of the ideology which led to the rise of GULAG. I have a digitised version of the cassette tape edition read by Frederick Davidson, it is long enough to take you across the world. It is also long enough to listen to it more than once since you won't catch everything on the first listen. I built a bathroom while listening to it leading to me associating certain parts - shower, floor, wall (I had to lift the house with hydraulic jacks to repair part of the timber wall which had rotted due to a leaking pipe) - with passages from the book. I'm currently listening to it again while mounting more solar panels on a barn roof.

I enjoyed the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past

I'm not a big audio-book person in general, and when I'm on long road trips I usually prefer to listen to music. I could definitely give you a list of good "road trip albums". But that's not the topic here, so I'll just say this... one of the few audio books that I managed to get really into (which also happens to be one of my favorite print books) is Neuromancer.

The one version I'm familiar with is about six hours long, so that would get you through a modest road trip. For longer trips, you could tack on the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy - that being Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

If you like fantasy, "The Eye of the World" by Robert Jordan. A new narration by Rosamund Pike was recently released corresponding to Amazon's release of their live-action series of this series. Overall, it's a well written, engaging story that begins an amazing series, should you become interested and desire to continue reading/listening. Weighs in at nearly 33 hours, so there's no way you'll have to start something different midway. And if you like it, there are 13 more installments in this epic fantasy.

I often circle back to What's Rangoon To You Is Grafton To Me, a radio play developed from a short story about a summer hitch-hiking adventure from Brisbane to Sydney in the 1970's.

[-1] http://www.simonrumble.com/psychedelicatessen/

[i] http://www.simonrumble.com/psychedelicatessen/rangoon_edited...

I've been traveling throughout SE Asia for the past few months which requires long flights and bus rides. I just finished up The Martian by Andy Weir and read by RC Bray, and am about 1/3rd the way through Project Hail Mary, also by Weir and narrated by Ray Porter. Both are fantastic if you're in to hard science fiction. Also, I think the choice of narrator makes or breaks whether or not an audiobook is good. In both audiobooks, the narrator has done a great job keeping me captivated with the story.

How long is your trip? George Guidall reading Don Quixote is good. Also there's this book called Death in Yellowstone, which is just hours of short descriptions of people who have died in various ways in Yellowstone. Something like that can be good if you're talking or concentrating on the road and can't follow a detailed plot.

A classic from my childhood, when it came on a brick-sized box of cassettes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(1981_ra...

Farewell to Arms by Hemingway. I didn’t set out to read it, it just happened to be in the car I was driving. The plot is straightforward and the dialogue clear; but the story is powerful. Not something I’d’ve read on paper but I’m glad I did

The Fellowship of the Ring. Contrary to the top current response, I do listen to this one over and over again.

Note : I am not a driver and listen to this when going on very long walks. It's possible that it doesn't gel as nicely with driving.

Ed Tong’s recent release, An Immense World, is an exploration of the unique sensory worlds of creatures throughout the animal kingdom. I enjoyed listening to it while my sensory world was confined to a car.

For road trips, I always go to the classics. Lord of the Rings. Either the Rob Inglis audiobook or the BBC Radio adaptation.

If I get to The Ride of the Rohirrim, I know I've driven too far.

Try Just William read by Martin Jarvis. Great for adults and kids!

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

A book about the rise and fall of Silk Road. I listened to this on a recent 12-hour road trip, and the hours melted away.

I've enjoyed these books during long drives and flights to Japan during the past decade.

The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher.

The Mistborn series, by Brandon Sanderson.

The Stormlight Chronicles, by Brandon Sanderson.

Choose Your Own Autobiography, by Neil Patrick Harris.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes.

Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, by Mark Skousen.

The Book of Mormon.

The Story of Civilization Series, by Will Durant.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux.

My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, especially enjoyable because it is read by Douglas Adams, the author, himself.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and We are Legend (We are Bob) are a couple I really enjoyed during road trips.

I really enjoyed “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World” a few years ago.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Steve Jobs biography. Listened to it while backpakcing in SE Asia.

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Honestly it is as great as the comics.

I have that on Audible and found it hard to keep track of the characters, and couldn't imagine trying that while driving. Maybe one needs to have already read the comics to appreciate the story (I haven't)

On that topic, American Gods. If I’m going to be driving, why not listen to a story about a road trip?

Terry Pratchett's Diskworld series is my long drive go to.

I've been working my way through the series of these. Though listening in the house, while doing 'stuff', rather than while travelling. The ones read by Nigel Planer are much better than the few which are read by other people.

Steve Martin - "Born Standing Up" is a nice one.

Devil in the White City (coming to the big screen)

The History of the English Language podcast.

The Red Mars series followed by The Expanse.

The Dark Tower series by Steven King

Margaret Atwoods Maddaddam Trilogy

Off to be the wizard

as scifi books fan: Expanse Altered Carbon

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