10 Great Books That Are Better As Audiobooks

Image via Doubleday Published Aug 22, 2026, 5:14 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Audiobooks are just that. Books made audio. If you don’t want to read words on a physical copy, or on a screen, then plenty of books have been narrated, and it’s another way to experience those stories. Whether it “counts” as reading is a whole other debate, but that’s not really the point here. Whatever you feel about whether reading is or isn't different from listening, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. If a book might well be even better when listened to, versus when read, it’s eligible to appear here. That’s not to say these books shouldn’t be read the traditional way at all, but there are interesting perks in every instance to listening to the audiobook versions. There have to be specific and interesting benefits, otherwise, this would probably turn into just praising great books that also happen to be great when you listen to them. Like, yes, 1965’s Dune and The Lord of the Rings are good listens… but what’s important – and a bit more intriguing – is what could well be better as a listen, versus a read. 10 'Mason & Dixon' (1997) Image via Henry Holt and Company Running for almost 34 hours, Mason & Dixon cannot be listened to in a day, unless you literally have 24 hours to burn and you have the whole thing running at 1.5x speed. Similarly, tackling a physical copy of the novel will take you a while, because it’s about as long as Thomas Pynchon’s similarly daunting Gravity’s Rainbow, though Mason & Dixon is a gentler read/listen than that one. Against the Day has both beat, in terms of length, but that’s another story (literally and figuratively). Mason & Dixon is being singled out here because the style of it all is unique and sometimes hard to read, because the language is deliberately antiquated (fitting, considering it’s set in the 1700s, and is intended to homage/parody literature of the era). So, the audiobook version is one way to make the whole thing a bit more digestible, not to mention immersive. It’s quite a cinematic audiobook, and proves quite easy to lose yourself in with more ease than you might have getting lost in just the text itself. 9 'Born to Run' (2016) Image via Simon & Schuster If you’ve seen Springsteen on Broadway, either when Bruce Springsteen was playing that show live or afterward, when a recording was made available on Netflix, then you'll probably be aware of how great a storyteller he is. You do get an impression of that from many of his albums too, sure (especially Nebraska, where the lyrics and stories feel especially important), but when he’s talking about his life between the songs, in Springsteen on Broadway, those anecdotes prove even more compelling than the music. Springsteen’s narration makes many of the stories told here feel even more personal and moving, for hopefully obvious reasons. So, Born to Run has value for feeling like those parts of that Springsteen show, but just expanded into a memoir that’s about 500 pages long. Like with a fair few memoirs, the author narrates the audiobook version, and Springsteen’s narration makes many of the stories told here feel even more personal and moving, for hopefully obvious reasons. Look, not everyone loves Springsteen, but if you're someone who does, listening to him narrate Born to Run – even if you’ve already read Born to Run without his narration – is a no-brainer. 8 'Trainspotting' (1993) Image via Penguin Random House Like with Mason & Dixon, there are stylistic choices in Trainspotting that make the whole book quite challenging to read in parts. This is beyond the content, too, though it’s worth noting that Trainspotting is difficult as both a normal book and an audiobook for how graphic it gets, in terms of painting a portrait of addiction. No, the real difficulty relevant here comes from all the slang used, and the accents of all the characters, and the narration itself. Lots of words are written differently to mirror the way those characters speak, and it’s a bit like how in the movie, you might find some of the dialogue hard to understand. But it goes further in the book, because the narration and non-dialogue portions have the same kind of slang. Enter Tam Dean Burn, who’s kind of a lifesaver as the narrator of this audiobook, honestly. He keeps the accents and all, but it’s a bit easier when you're listening to it compared to trying to decipher it on the page. 7 'American Tabloid' (1995) Image via Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Jeff Harding seems to be the go-to narrator for James Ellroy's books, or at least he’s a voice you'll become familiar with if you listen to either Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet or the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. It’s a bit hard to put it into words, but Harding’s voice and style of narration are perfectly suited to how intense, downbeat, and anxiety-provoking so many of Ellroy’s best crime novels are. And Ellroy’s masterpiece is probably American Tabloid, which naturally follows on from the events of the L.A. Quartet in terms of the timeframe covered (but not necessarily the characters, since Ellroy switches up protagonists – but not supporting characters – fairly regularly) and the style. The cynicism and speed of the novel itself is supported (and then some) by Harding’s narration, making an already pretty great novel feel fairly close to perfect. 6 'Sonny Boy: A Memoir' (2024) Image via Penguin Al Pacino talks about all the great gangster movies he’s starred in throughout his memoir, Sonny Boy, but also spends a bit of time on the lesser-known roles he’s done, and on parts of his life not related to acting. He writes effectively for sure, but a good memoir is made great when you listen to it, because Pacino effectively gives a voice-only performance when reading this book from start to finish. And he’s one of the best actors of all time, so it really is a great performance, doing for narration what some of his best on-screen performances did for cinema. Pacino also makes the narration a bit more casual, adding in a few words and sounds that aren’t on the page, which serves to make the audiobook version of Sonny Boy feel more conversational and even easier to get pulled into. Who wouldn’t want to hear Al Pacino basically talk to them about his life for about a dozen hours? 5 'Libra' (1988) Image via Viking Press Libra is a good companion novel to American Tabloid, or it’s more accurate to say that American Tabloid is a good companion piece (or spiritual sequel) to Libra, since Libra came first. Both do slightly different things, proving intense in their own distinctive ways while continually building to the same event: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. There’s a bit more of a psychological drama/thriller spin to Libra, while American Tabloid does dive a bit more into the conspiracy side of things (albeit not in as tacky a way as you might fear). Don DeLillo’s prose in Libra is probably the best he’s ever written, and you do feel the whole nightmarish uncertainty of the whole situation – and that event/time in history – even more when you're listening to the whole thing. It'll put you on edge, or maybe even over that same edge, but in a good way. 4 'A Confederacy of Dunces' (1980) Image via Grove Press If the narrator is right, then A Confederacy of Dunces has the capacity to go from good to great. At the same time, poor narration could be unlistenable when a book has as distinct a voice and style as this. Also, A Confederacy of Dunces has a lot of dialogue, and much of it’s funny, but the wrong kind of narration is going to undermine the humor or make it all sound awkward in a bad way, like a comedian with no stage presence trying to deliver otherwise good material. With the voices right, though, A Confederacy of Dunces makes for a great listen. It can be even easier to appreciate all the dialect and absurdity of some of what happens (or doesn't happen) throughout the whole strange and chaotic book. Also, if you're someone who prefers listening to or watching something over reading, an audiobook of A Confederacy of Dunces might be as good as it gets, since a movie adaptation of this acclaimed book seems to remain ever elusive. 3 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir' (2022) Image via Penguin Press Unlike the other memoirs already mentioned, you kind of have to listen to Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir, rather than read it. Well, if you do really want to read it, then read it while listening to Werner Herzog narrating his own bizarre words. Sure, that might mean technically having to pay for the same thing twice, but this book is enhanced so much by hearing it. Herzog has one of the most distinctive voices of all time, and you couple how he sounds with the distinctive way he writes, and you're left with something rather incredible. If you’ve ever enjoyed the way he narrates various documentaries of his, then you're pretty much guaranteed to get something out of hearing him talk about his strange and eventful life for a bit over 13 hours. 2 'The Stand' (1978) So, The Stand is extremely long, especially if you tackle the uncut version of the book, which was published in 1990 (it expanded – and then amended some details of – an already lengthy novel). It’s not one of those Stephen King epics that’s particularly difficult to finish, but if you are struggling with the 1200-ish pages of that uncut version, then the epic-length audiobook might be your friend. You get a sense of the book’s immensity from just looking at the audiobook itself, because it’s almost 50 hours all up (or shorter, obviously, if you change the speed of the audio). Because much of this dark fantasy novel involves traveling through desolate settings (the world has pretty much ended, after all), The Stand feels particularly suitable to listen to if you're traveling yourself, especially if it’s a road trip. It’ll add to things emotionally, you might well be able to empathize with some of the traveling characters better, and the horrific parts could prove more horrific, too (alone, on a road, late at night… playing with fire, maybe, but it’d be an immersive listen). 1 'The Odyssey' (8th century BC) Image via W. W. Norton & Company On one hand, The Odyssey isn't really a book, because it first existed before books were a thing, and then also, when you read it nowadays, you're reading an interpretation and/or translation of that ancient story. If it’s recognizable as a work of literature, though, then it’s also the perfect example of something that benefits from being listened to rather than read. Reading is better if you want to analyze or understand everything, sure, but since The Odyssey developed as an oral tradition, and people all those years ago experienced tellings of the story that is The Odyssey, then listening to it as an audiobook is arguably more authentic to how the story was first experienced. Maybe the more theatrical the narrator, the better (and since it’s old and some translations are well and truly in the public domain, there’s no shortage of options out there if you want to listen to The Odyssey).