Audiobooks

We love listening to audiobooks as we beetle around town to dance class and French class and wherever else we need to go.  We go to the library and borrow a few at a time and play them whenever the girls and I are all in the car together.  I love to introduce the girls to some of my favourite classics this way.  I know that they will be more likely to pick them up and read them if they have already heard the story.  There is nothing so fun as hearing chuckles and belly laughs and sighs coming from the backseat at all the right moments! (or, "Blech! Yuck!" when it's a kissy bit in Jane Eyre).

Have His Carcase: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery
by Dorthy L. Sayers
A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation
(2 hrs 30 min)

(After listening to Clouds of Witness last year we all enjoyed this one, and our introduction to Harriet Vane.)

Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte
Penguin Audio Books, 1996
Read by Joanna David
abridged (6 hrs)

(I liked Joanna David's reading of Rochester especially.  So many presentations of that character leave me wondering what on earth Jane sees in him!)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by Alan Bradley
read by Jayne Entwistle
Random House Audio, 2009
unabridged (10 hrs)

(I started listening to this on my own as I was not sure how appropriate it would be for family listening, but restarted it with Elizabeth, 11yrs, who thoroughly enjoyed it.  Jayne Entwistle does an incredible job sounding like an eleven-year old!)


The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag
by Alan Bradley
read by Jayne Entwistle
Random House Audio

Wives and Daughters
by Elizabeth Gaskell
read by various readers
LibriVox
Free Audio Download

(Although some of the readers were better than others all were easy to listen to and I thoroughly enjoyed the story.)