Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 19, 2024, 08:08:22 AM

Login with username, password and session length

Audible/Audiobook recommendations

Started by Twit 2, December 13, 2017, 10:47:46 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Twit 2

I made the mistake of getting an Audible subscription without knowing any good titles or having the time to listen to any. I've got I Partridge and 6 credits. What should I spunk them on?

Porter Dimi

The ensemble cast reading of Lincoln in the Bardo is very good.

If you're feeling like a non-fiction listen, why not try The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany? It's only 57 hours long, after all.

bgmnts

Nomad, if you like Partridge.

Have a lot of the xfm stuff and gervais, merchant and pilkington podcasts/audiobooks, good for a laugh.

Anything narrated by Simon Callow, he's terrific.


I like the red dwarf novels too as Chris Barrie is good.

Oh and Alien: Out of the Shadows. Has Rutger Hauer in it!

poloniusmonk

Steve Martin's Born Standing Up is pretty great.


popcorn

There are shitloads of really good books about North Korea. "Without Us, There Is No You" is the one I most recently enjoyed, about teaching English to NK university students. "Nothing to Envy" is good too.

The one I always recommend to anyone who's at all interested in pop culture is Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. This one completely fascinated me. The premise is that the author, a music journalist, tries to understand why anyone could like Celine Dion, but it ends up being an exploration of the whole concept of taste. What makes some things cool and other things lame? This was so interesting I might read it again soon, in fact.

shiftwork2

Audible are shitehawks for doing this.  If you cancel you lose all credits so you're forced to choose all your remaining books at once, then cancel.  And they use Amazon credentials so it's not obvious (when you sign up for the freebie) that they already have your card details...then you forget about the recurring payments.

Anyway, I found Bill Bryson good for commuting when you might want something in bite size chunks.  Just make sure it's not read by Bill himself as his stilted tones killed off at least one of his for me.

Z

Robert Caro's the Power Broker will occupy you for a few months if you get into it, nearly 70 hours long iirc.

__steve__

Quote from: Danger Man on December 14, 2017, 11:21:12 PM
Anything read by Alex Jennings

Especially Nicholas Nickleby. Absolutely fucking superb.

Ive been really enjoying Audible. Think the main issue is unless you have a ridick amount of time and attention in your possession, youre not gonna get through the bigger books by the time youre next credit rolls around, capiche? You should be able to choose a subscription every OTHER month or even more.

Can you cancel, finish the books you have then resubscribe?

A tip; when u cancel they ask u for a reason. I put too expensive and theyve set my subscription to 3.99 for three months which Im happy with. Gonna get those 3 books then cancel as itll take me ages to get through that amount what with life and also posting daft threads about food on here.


Id heavily recommend The Name of the Wind which Ive been enjoying over the last month and a bit. I dont think ive read one fantasy book since leaving adolescence and only sought this one due to having a credit and not knowing what to get.

Its great; by no small part due to the phenomenal narrator who employs an endless and vast amount of voices for each character major to minor. Honestly hes incredible; cant remember his name but hes actually had brief appearances in a few uk comedies from the 90s and 00s , Nathan barley and stuff. But what a reader! Story is great too, nothing thats breaking the rules of fantasy but very relaxing to listen to at bedtime, very immersive

Quote from: Misspent Boners on October 20, 2018, 10:24:24 PM

Can you cancel, finish the books you have then resubscribe?


Yeah, I've done this a few times when the books start piling up.

mojo filters

Bob Woodward's Fear is absolutely essential for anyone interested in politics. As is David Frum's Trumpocracy, Everything Trump Touches Dies and Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green (focused on Steve Bannon but far more interesting than that sounds).

Also Michael Wolff's Fire And Fury is fascinating, as long as you bear in mind the questionable sourcing. Jon Meacham's The Soul Of America is a phenomenal historical perspective, whilst Chris Matthews' book on Bobby Kennedy is very thorough yet entertaining - just like his journalism.

Steve Kornacki's new book The Red And The Blue is probably going to be amazing (he really knows his granular electoral political onions!) but I've not listened to that one yet.

Fans of Serial podcast will enjoy Rabia Choudry's book, Adnan's Story - she's actually a great writer, whilst the book shows non of the less endearing qualities of her personality apparent from her Twitter vitriol.

If Stewart Lee's seminal work How I Escaped My Certain Fate is available as audio book, that's a must-listen. I think I've read the book far more times than I've watched the videos!

imitationleather

Is there a point where they stop you from returning audiobooks you've listened to and exchanging them for a new one free of charge? Surely I can't just keep doing this indefinitely. Amazon will go bust!

Currently listening to Mark Urban's Skripal book. This is the first non-comedy audiobook I've tried since McMafia, which I found such an onslaught of names and places that I really couldn't follow it in audio form. That's a book I'd definitely need to read an actual paper copy of, so I can go over and repeat the long passages where it's just lists of names that all sound the same (racist) and places I've never heard of (xenophobic and ignorant).

garbed_attic

Reece Shearsmith's Robert Aickman narrations are just sublime and perfect Halloween reading. Deeply unsettling, dry as a bone but with a strain of ghoulish fun, despite all that. If you like M.R. James and/or The League of Gentlemen they come *highly* recommended.

Cold Hand in Mine is perhaps the best place to start.

Lord Mandrake

Unless you log on to the audible website, you might not realise that you can return titles for credit, one in one out regardless of price and it seems unlimited - I've returned about twelve books . You can also suspend your account for up to three months and if you threaten to leave they will give you free shit too. As for recommendations;

The Spy and the Tailor - Ben Macintyre
Avenger - Frederick Forsyth
A Legacy of Spies - John Le Carre (Read by Tom Hollander)
Toast on Toast - Steven Toast
Once a Pilgrim - James Deegan