actors reading audiobooks

my experience with actors reading audiobooks has been for the most part very good. i suppose it shouldn't be surprising since audiobooks depend a lot on performance and interpretation. i listened recently to a collection of short stories by john cheever, and the best thing about it was meryl streep reading a couple of pieces. the same thing can be said about matt dillon reading on the road by kerouac. sean penn reading chronicles by bob dylan was a brilliant choice. and of course my all time favorite, i've said this before, is ron silver reading philip roth, american pastoral, plot against america and i married a communist. it is not only the match of the personality of the actor/actress to the work, it is the craft they can bring, how they can modulate their voices and how they interpret text.

it doesn't always work great. tim robbins reading the great gatsby sounded very promising but it was just meh. same thing with matt damon reading a peoples history of the united states. also as i write this i do notice a pattern. sometimes big time actors do get bored at some point during the reading. i did notice that with penn and dillon.

what has been your experience?

Jeremy Irons reading Brideshead Revisited was amazing. Perfect in every way. I haven't seen it, but I understand he played in the older miniseries.

Also, Ann Massey did a fantastic job reading Rebecca. She also played in an older production of it, as Mrs. Danvers, I think. Her reading is superb.

I think I heard Joe Mantagna reading a Robert Parkerand his depiction of the women were dreadful.
It might not have been Mategna, but it was someone
like that. A tough, serious actor type.His women sounded like drag queens.

Blair Brown ("The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd") does a terrific job reading Anne Tyler's books.

Sian Phillips (Livia from the TV series "I, Claudius") makes the perfect narrator for: No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year by Virginia Ironside.

Oh! I just bet Sian Phillips was perfect! I haven't really wanted to read No, I don't want to join a book club, but I might just get it on audio just to hear her read it.

Rene Auberjonois's reading of Cemetery Dance was awful. I liked him in the TV shows he acted in awhile back but couldn't stand the way he narrated that book. He was as breathlessly intense over a character buying a loaf of bread as finding a dead body (not actual things in the book but representational examples only). Made me long to be able to stop, but I had to finish it because I promised to write a review.

"Book Club" has been tagged "Bridget Jones for the senior set", but that's kinda simplistic (disclaimer: I liked "Bridget Jones' Diary"); it has subplots about ageing and losing people, etc.

The only other actor I can think of whom I can recall as narrator would be Rupert Degas (I didn't say a well-known one!), who does a great job with Haruki Murakami's material.

I'm currently listening to John Rubenstein who I think had a big career on tv and on the stage. He's doing Jonathan Kellerman's Bones.His reading is far too aggressive for my taste. I saw Rubenstein on Broadway back in the sventies.

Oooh, good topic! In case anyone hasn't found it already, Silk Sound Books is dedicated to actors narrating ('performing' in their words) audiobooks. Audible also has a series of audiobooks read by talented actors, but I've mostly just stumbled upon them piecemeal - I'm not sure that there's a dedicated webpage for them.

My favourite 'voice' is Bill Nighy. He does quite a few BBC dramatizations, but unfortunately not so many straightforward audiobooks. Still, he did a really excellent version of Edgard Allan Poe's Dupin Mysteries.

Jeremy Irons reading Brideshead Revisited (mentioned above) and Lolita is amazing. I think the fact that he acted in adaptations of both allowed him to really understand the texts in ways that perhaps not all readers do - and of course he has an utterly beautiful voice.

Kenneth Branagh does a very solid Heart of Darkness, which I liked both more and less than I expected to. I guess that's the problem with expectations - they're usually wrong in all sorts of ways!

Alan Rickman reading The Return of the Native was disappointing somehow. His voice is wonderful, and his reading was fine, but something about it made me keep drifting off and losing my place.

Lynn Redgrave gave an excellent Inkheart - I wish they had allowed her to finish the series. She reminds me that the Narnia books were all recorded by great actors - the effect was rather uneven, I thought, but her recording and those of Derek Jacobi (who is also recorded I, Claudius and the Homeric epics) and Michael York (who did a wonderful A Brave New World) were all great.

Hmm, must stop now before I start branching out into sci-fi/fantasy (Michael Hogan! Wil Wheaton! James Marsters!) or I'll never get any sleep tonight...

My own favorite is Sissy Spacek's reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, which captures Scout's voice perfectly. But beware, don't listen to it where it can be overheard by someone who doesn't understand what's going on, because (being set in 1930s Alabama) it's chock full of the n***** word.

One really interesting reading is that version of Peter and the Wolf read jointly a few years ago by Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Sophia Loren, for which they won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word for Children. In addition to the Prokofiev version, it also includes a version told in defense of the wolf (read, perhaps appropriately, by Bill Clinton). This is a surprisingly difficult CD to find, given the Grammy and the celebrity of the readers, but I did finally come up with it a little while ago on either Amazon or eBay.

3 I just finished listening to Brideshead Revisted, read performed by Jeremy Irons. Fabulous!! I followed up the audiobook with the movie, the 2008 Miramax version with Emma Thompson; she rocks!

10 To Kill a Mockingbird by Sissy Spacek sounds like another I would really enjoy.

I've got an audio book version of Einstein's Dreams read by Michael York (Logan's Run, The 3 Musketeers, Austin Powers...).
I suspect he got tapped to do it because he's quite at ease speaking German. There are many places where he's pronouncing the names of streets or cities or other words in German, and he slips between the languages as if it were all the same.

He's not my favorite narrator, but I can't imagine anyone else doing it.

Elaine Stritch reading Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a favorite.

I also have a set of the Chronicles of Narnia read by an impressive cast of actors, all very good.

#12 Who was the Chronicles on Narnia audiobook by? I'd love to listen to it I have been keeping eye out for a while for a good one. Who were the main actors involved?

#14 I have a lovely set of Narnia audiobooks. Readers are:

Lion, Witch , Wardrobe - Michael York
Prince Caspian - Lynne Redgrave
Voyage of the Dawn Treader - Derek Jacobi
The Silver Chair - Jeremy Northam
The Magician's Nephew - Kenneth Branagh
The Horse and His Boy - Alex Jennings
The Last Battle - Patrick Stewart

I particularly like Jeremy Northam (I love his Puddleglum) and Alex Jennings, although they're all good, of course.

#15 I have that set too! I particularly loved Lynn Redgrave's rendition, but that could be partially due to the influence of her version of Inkheart which I adored.

Thank you people :)

Richard Gere reads several of The Dalai Lama's non-fiction books and does them justice.

What a wonderful thread! I've added No! I Don't Want to Join A Book Club to my wish list. Totally appropriate as I celebrate a certain birthday soon.

Joe Mantegna was mentioned in #4. He is my most unfavorite reader (celebrity or otherwise). And, he dared to take on one of my favorites, Robert Parker's Spenser. Mantegna made awkward pauses that were jarring. I always wondered if they marked the turning of pages.

Just recently discovered some of audio books read by the late Roddy McDowell (I think he was most famous for the original Planet of the Apes). Great actor and voice on audio! One of his classics was just released on a Playaway devise: Battlefield Earth. I can't wait to pick it up. Definitely one of my favorite readers now -- also one of my favorite books! -- I am sure it'll be great. I'll keep you all posted.

Just saw where the great Anna Massey has just passed away. She will be a great loss to both the acting world and the dramatized audiobook world.

The only actor audiobook I've listened to is the Star Trek novelization read by Zachary Quinto. I could take or leave the book itself, but eight hours of Zachary Quinto's voice? I'll take that any time.

I listened to Ian McKellan reading Wolf Brother, the first in the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series by Michelle Paver (young adult books about a boy living in the stoneage) and he was very good. Although I have to say his style was very dramatic, which suited this book fine, but might not suit every book.

I haven't had great luck with actor-readers, I'll have to keep a note of this thread.

One that I loved (and didn't really expect to, as I'd become a bit jaded about it by then) was Prunella Scales reading Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. You *have* to love the reader to finish that as an audio book, since it's 26 hours long!

Gary Sinese does a great job reading Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.

OK, so a year later......

How do people prefer to find out if an actor has done audiobooks? I know IMDB covers actors' voice work on animated films/TV shows, but do they list audiobooks? Is there some other online resource that has a great database -- put in name of reader, and up pops all their audiobooks?

Or is LibraryThing the best place to find out this kind of info? :-)

I really enjoy Hugh Fraser (Captain Hastings) narrating the Poirot stories. David Suchet (Poirot himself) also does a fantastic job.
I'm just starting a Doctor Who audio book Pest Control narrated by, who else, David Tennant. He reads with his native Scottish accent which is a delight.
Alex Jennings does a great job with The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.

James Marsters gets off to a rocky start with the Dresden Files series, but after the first few books he becomes superb.