When a Great Narrator Makes the Story Even Better
There are books you read.
And then there are books you can still hear years later.
You remember the cadence of a character’s voice. The perfectly delivered joke. The accent you would never have invented in your own head. The narrator who somehow managed to turn a cast of twenty people into twenty completely recognizable voices—and made you forget there was only one person sitting behind the microphone.
A great audiobook isn’t just someone reading a book aloud.
Sometimes, it’s a performance.
And every once in a while, it’s such a good performance that going back and reading the book in print almost feels like something is missing.
We love physical books. We love ebooks. We have absolutely bought more books than any reasonable household could justify.
But some stories?
We want someone to tell them to us.
First Things First: Yes, Audiobooks Count
There is a strange little corner of book culture that insists listening to an audiobook isn’t really reading.
And, sure. If we’re being extremely literal, your eyeballs aren’t decoding printed words while you listen to an audiobook.
You also aren’t physically turning pages on a Kindle. Somehow civilization survived that transition.
What actually matters to most of us when we talk about having “read” a book is whether we experienced the story: Did we follow the plot? Understand the ideas? Get to know the characters? Laugh at the jokes? Become irrationally angry at a fictional person?
Research suggests that listening can do that just fine.
In one study, researchers randomly assigned 91 adults to experience the same material as an audiobook, as an ebook, or by reading and listening simultaneously. When researchers tested both immediate comprehension and retention two weeks later, they found no statistically significant differences among the groups. Sage Journals
That doesn’t mean reading and listening are neurologically identical, or that an audiobook is the best way to tackle every kind of material. A dense chemistry textbook is probably not the moment to put the audio on 1.8x while unloading the dishwasher.
But for experiencing a story?
We’re comfortable calling it reading.
The Book Police may address their complaints to the dungeon.
Sometimes the Narrator Becomes Part of the Story
This is where audiobooks get interesting.
A merely competent narrator can disappear into a book.
A great narrator does something else entirely.
They find the joke hiding in a sentence. They give a character a voice you hadn’t imagined but immediately recognize as exactly right. They know when to rush and when to leave a tiny bit of silence hanging after a line.
And when there are dozens of characters, the really extraordinary narrators somehow let you know who is speaking before the text tells you.
That’s not a replacement for the author’s work. It’s another layer of storytelling laid on top of it.
There are books we’ve enjoyed in audio.
And then there are audiobooks where the narrator is so tangled up in our memory of the story that separating the two seems almost impossible.
These are some of those books.
Audiobooks Where the Narrator Is Part of the Magic
Harry Potter — Narrated by Jim Dale
For a lot of American listeners, Jim Dale is the sound of Harry Potter.
Seven books. Hundreds of characters. An absurd assortment of voices, accents, creatures, ghosts, professors, children, villains, and people who occasionally turn into animals.
And somehow, you know who’s talking. The Molly Weasly who tells 11-year-old Harry to run through the barrier at King’s Cross is the same Molly Weasly who shouts, “Not my daughter…” during the Battle of Hogwarts. Absolute consistency.
Dale’s performance doesn’t just distinguish Harry from Ron and Hermione. Even relatively minor characters acquire their own voices and rhythms, which becomes increasingly impressive as the cast balloons over the enormous series.
There are now lavish new full-cast editions of the Harry Potter series, but the original Jim Dale recordings aren’t going anywhere. The official Harry Potter site says the Jim Dale and Stephen Fry editions have accumulated 1.4 billion listening hours on Audible alone and will continue to be available alongside the newer productions.
The full-cast versions may be spectacular.
But if Jim Dale’s Hagrid, McGonagall, Dobby, or Hermione already lives in your head, we suspect he’ll be difficult to evict.
Listen if: You want a long series to disappear into, especially on a road trip or during a Harry Potter reread.
LISTEN TO HARRY POTTER → (paid link)
The Flavia de Luce Series — Narrated by Jayne Entwistle
Flavia de Luce is eleven years old.
She is brilliant, wildly precocious, obsessed with chemistry and poisons, prone to investigating murders, and occasionally insufferable in exactly the way an eleven-year-old genius should be.
Which means the voice matters.
A lot.
Jayne Entwistle doesn’t simply narrate Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries. She gives Flavia exactly the combination of intelligence, indignation, curiosity, mischief, and complete confidence in her own superior reasoning that makes the character work.
These are charming mysteries on the page.
In audio, Flavia feels like she’s personally telling you what happened—and probably judging your inferior powers of observation while she does it.
This is one of those series where the narrator and character have become almost inseparable for us.
Start with: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Listen if: You like clever mysteries, eccentric English villages, dark humor, and child protagonists who are considerably smarter than most of the adults around them.
LISTEN TO FLAVIA DE LUCE → (paid link)
The Pendergast Series — Narrated by René Auberjonois
Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast is not exactly a normal FBI agent.
He’s brilliant. Immaculately dressed. Pale enough to raise questions. Impossibly calm. Deeply strange.
So René Auberjonois’s wonderfully measured narration – and his pecularily honeyed New Orleans drawl – fits him beautifully.
Auberjonois narrated multiple books in Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s long-running Pendergast series, and his controlled, distinctive delivery matches a character who can walk into an absolutely horrifying situation and somehow sound mildly inconvenienced by it.
These books bounce between thriller, mystery, horror, archaeology, science, and the occasional situation that is frankly difficult to categorize.
Auberjonois makes the weirdness sound perfectly reasonable.
Which may be the most Pendergast thing possible.
Listen if: You like intelligent thrillers, creepy mysteries, strange science, ancient secrets, and protagonists who are considerably odder than everyone around them.
EXPLORE THE PENDERGAST AUDIOBOOKS → (paid link)
Project Hail Mary — Narrated by Ray Porter
We’re going to be annoyingly vague about this one.
That’s intentional
Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary begins with a man waking up somewhere he doesn’t recognize with a fairly significant problem:
He doesn’t remember who he is.
We could tell you more.
We’re not going to.
What we will tell you is that Ray Porter’s narration is exceptional—and that there comes a point when the audiobook format itself does something with the story that print simply cannot do in quite the same way.
The less you know about that before you encounter it, the better.
We aren’t alone in thinking the audio version is special. Project Hail Mary won the Audio Publishers Association’s 2022 Audiobook of the Year, with one of the award’s judges specifically praising the way the production used audio to expand the story.
So we’re invoking the extremely scientific Storyworld Supply recommendation system here:
Trust us. Listen to this one.
Listen if: You like science fiction, survival stories, mysteries, problem solving, humor, or discovering a story without knowing exactly where it’s going.
LISTEN TO PROJECT HAIL MARY → (paid link)
Dungeon Crawler Carl — Narrated by Jeff Hays
And then there’s Carl.
If you’ve spent any time elsewhere on Storyworld Supply, you may have noticed that we have…some feelings about Dungeon Crawler Carl.
The premise is ridiculous in the best possible way: Earth has essentially been repossessed, the survivors are dumped into a lethal alien dungeon that’s being broadcast across the galaxy as entertainment, and Carl enters wearing a leather jacket, heart-print boxer shorts, and no pants.
His ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, comes with him.
Things escalate.
Matt Dinniman’s series is funny, violent, bizarre, unexpectedly emotional—and Jeff Hays’s narration turns the whole thing into something perilously close to a one-man radio drama.
Carl sounds like Carl.
Donut sounds like Donut.
The AI sounds like…well, we’re not going to try to explain the AI here.
The remarkable part is how quickly you stop thinking about the fact that one performer is creating these voices. They simply become the characters.
And because so much of Dungeon Crawler Carl depends on comic timing, absurd announcements, sudden shifts in tone, and characters with enormous personalities, audio feels almost tailor-made for it.
If you’ve tried LitRPG before and decided it wasn’t for you, we’d still give this one a chance.
And if you’ve only read Carl?
This is one of the rare occasions when we’re going to tell you to go back and listen to a book you already know.
Listen if: You like dark humor, wildly inventive world-building, video games, ridiculous premises taken completely seriously, talking cats, or books that somehow make you care deeply about people five minutes after making you laugh at something completely inappropriate.
LISTEN TO DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL → (paid link)
A Good Audiobook Is a Ridiculously Convenient Portal
There’s another reason we love audiobooks that has nothing to do with literary arguments or award-winning narrators.
They give you back story time.
You can read while driving.
You can read while walking the dog.
You can read while folding laundry, cooking dinner, sitting in airport traffic, pulling weeds, cleaning the garage, or doing any of the approximately 47 boring things adulthood apparently requires every week.
And suddenly the annoying errand isn’t quite as annoying because you have seventeen minutes left in the chapter and something is happening.
There is a peculiar danger here.
You may find yourself sitting in your driveway after arriving home because you aren’t ready to stop listening.
You may voluntarily perform household chores.
You may decide a four-hour drive really isn’t that bad.
This is how they get you.
The Best Audiobooks Don’t Feel Like a Compromise
That’s really the point.
Audiobooks aren’t the version of reading you settle for because you’re too busy to pick up a “real” book.
Sometimes they’re simply another way into the story.
And occasionally, when the right narrator meets the right book, they’re our favorite way into it.
Jim Dale’s enormous cast of wizarding voices. Jayne Entwistle’s wonderfully precocious Flavia. René Auberjonois’s unflappable Pendergast. Ray Porter’s performance in Project Hail Mary. Jeff Hays somehow convincing us that an award-winning Persian cat really is yelling at Carl.
Those performances don’t sit beside our memories of the books.
They’re part of them.
And that, more than anything, is the magic of audiobooks.
Want to Try Audiobooks?
If you’ve never really gotten into audiobooks, don’t start with something you feel like you should read.
Start with something that’s genuinely fun to hear.
Any of the five above would be a good choice, but if we were trying to convert a confirmed audiobook skeptic, we’d probably hand them Project Hail Mary or Dungeon Crawler Carl and see what happened.
And the best part is you can try Audible – for free! Pick an amazing book, make yourself a nice drink, and settle in for an experience!
TRY AUDIBLE FOR FREE→ (paid link)
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