SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Listening to a story is different from reading it. Usually, a library will have an ebook & audiobook copy of the book. So, if you can, I would recommend getting both as you test out what works for you in audio format.

If you find it hard to just listen to the story and retrain it, you can try to listen to the audio and read the ebook.

I suggest getting audiobooks in your favorite genre or trying out old favs in audio. Libby let's you speed up the audio up to 2x. If the narrator sounds too slow, you have the option of speeding it up.

I was not a fan of audiobooks for a long time because the readers read the story without any inflection or nuance. Now, there's a wide range of narrators that can enhance the story with their reading. Vocal acting and theater style narration are great skills that some of the current narrators have. A couple of my fav narrators are also actors.

My first Audio book was read by Scott Brick - for some reason I really like his voice. He read the The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks.

Also The Harry Potter books have some great audio reading.

On the other hand I listened to an audio book by Stephen King he narrated himself - it was ok but other's I have listened to are much better. It took me a couple cd's to figure out he wasn't still talking about his normal life because the character was an author.

My suggestion is you get the book from the library - if you don't like the reading return it. I listen to a ton of books - always have at least two or three in the hopper and listen at 1.25. Any faster and the voice get too squeaky for me.

If you go with a real complicated book - it tends to get hard to remember all the players. I think I recall The Hunger GamesThe Sword of Shannara being pretty good too.

One that flips around in time - like The Time Traveler's Wife is very hard to keep track of.

I'd highly recommend Illuminae on audiobook. It's YA scifi, but is seriously the best audiobook I've ever listened to. (Along with its sequels.)

It's fully dramatised, with individual characters played by different voice actors.

I second the Illuminae recommendation, it was amazing.
I also like RC Bray as a narrator, he's narrated books like The Martian, Helldivers and Expeditionary Force (I don't which of those could be avaliable in Libby since I don't use it).
Children of Time on audiobook was also an amazing experience.
Apart from that audible has free audiobooks for children for free, and Scarlet Johanson's Alice in Wonderland was just perfect too.

Check out the Best and Worst Audiobooks and Narrators thread linked below to see some narrators people have liked and disliked. We don’t all agree, but maybe you’ll get some ideas! 😊

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Everyone else, please continue recommending good starter audios and giving other tips here in this thread.

I agree that a reread is a good place to start if you’re worried about being able to concentrate. Once you get used to the format, everything gets easier and you might be able to multitask and get through tons of books in a short time!

Audiobooks I found easy to follow because the narrator's voice enhances the experience were

Skyward (in the version read by Sofie Aldred - there are two versions out there): YA SF with a great story and wonderful characters.

The Bear and the Nightingale read by Kathleen Gati: a Fantasy story following Russian folklore.

Guns of the Dawn read by Emma Newman: a Jane Austen with Guns novel.

My first audiobook was Sabriel by Garth Nix, read by Tim Curry, and I’d highly recommend it as a’starter’ audiobook. Clear narration and a linear story made it easy to follow (plus it’s a great series)

Illuminae is brilliant as a physical book. It’s formatted in a different manner to most other books.

I recommend starting with Sylvain Neuvel's short story 'The Test'. It's less than 3 hours long and should be available on libby.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War was good on audio and I agree with Children of Time

One thing when getting an audio book - make sure it is unabridged.

I use overdrive but can't believe it is much different than Libby. You can see if it is abridged when you select it to borrow under details in Overdrive.

I was totally underwhelmed by The Day of the Triffids that I listened too. A lot of times there are multiple audios of a popular book.

Hey thanks for the link - that is very cool.

If you want to try audio consumption of books out without investing many hours you can try sudio fiction podcasts. LeVar Burton does a fabulous one, StarShipSofa Podcast Magazine, EscapePod and PodCastle are a couple. Many SFF fiction magazines (Uncanny for example) do audio versions of the stories.

My gateway audiobook was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as narrated by Patrick Fraley. He did a great job with the different dialects that are hard to read on paper.

I found that is was helpful that it was a story I was already somewhat familiar with. And, as someone said above, it's helpful to choose something that's linear, as Twain's story is. Flashbacks and multiple PoVs are challenging.

Next I listened to some short stories from the SF 'collections' on librivox. And some books for younger children. Now I'm comfortable with most genres & styles and many narrators, whether on my walk or on a road trip... but I still prefer paper books!

If you're listening in the car, have a backup available. I was excited to listen to a Space Opera collection but the narrators were barely intelligible over the road noise... and I have a quiet car and was on a rural road trip! And the thing is, volume didn't help... it was a matter of clarity.

After I learned how to read I really hated being read to. I had a hard time following the audiobooks when I first started. I got over that after 3 or 4 books and now I listen to about one each day. If you are a member of Kindle Unlimited, you can often get both the Kindle and the audiobooks for free. They will sync together automatically through Whispersync so you can follow along with the narration. I did that when I started. Listen to the sample, some narrators are easier to understand than others, they read at different speeds and some are a lot more entertaining than others. You can also adjust the speed of the narration. You'll learn what you like pretty quickly.

Yes Diane...Levar Burton Reads is brilliant. Nice bite sized stories read well. And he has so many to choose from now.

Check out a sample of the audiobook for Among Others, which is on the group bookshelf. I think that the Welsh accent used for the first person narrator adds a lot to the experience.

I listened to a good one last year in Libby, Doctor Who: The Wheel of Ice, by Stephen Baxter. It was fairly easy to follow.

Unsurprisingly, a good audiobook usually stands and falls with its narrator. A good narrator really brings the story and the characters to life instead of just reading them out.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher and narrated by James Marsters first got me into audiobooks and while that series might not be high literature, Marsters' narration makes all the difference. Other narrators I always love listening to are Will Patton and Luke Daniels. Ah yes, and Neil Gaiman does a particularly great job narrating his own stories.