Did you know that there’s a special award to honor high-quality audiobooks? The Audie Award “seeks the very best in spoken-word entertainment, selecting winners worthy of what is known as the ‘Oscar’ of audiobooks, displaying excellence in narration, production, and content” (Booklist, 2020). Last week’s ceremony marked the 25th anniversary of the Audies, given out by the Audio Publishers Association. You can find a list of honored audiobooks from our collection here.
The top honor, Audiobook of the Year, went to The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff, which we have in both CD and downloadable versions (CloudLibrary). The New York Times Book Review said of this audio, “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 is a book exquisitely suited to audio format, a detailed cataloging of hundreds of personal stories, read by actors and culled from 5,000 oral histories conducted and archived around the country.”
One of my recent favorite listens is also on this list, Daisy Jones and the Six, which was nominated in the Best Multi-Voiced Performance category. It is a novel, but the structure is also an oral-history style, a behind-the-music documentary of a fictional band. It features a star-studded cast, including Jennifer Beals, Benjamin Bratt, Judy Greer, Pablo Schreiber, and many veteran audiobook narrators such as Ari Fliakos, January LaVoy, Robinne Lee and Julia Whelan. The book’s structure was well-suited to audio format, and the multiple narrators brought their characters to life so well, I had to remind myself that it wasn’t about a real band!
Whether you listen to audiobooks all the time, or you’ve been waiting for the right book for your first listen, you’re sure to find something great on the list of Audie Award honorees!
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