Audiobooks are a godsend when it comes to long commutes. If you’re driving less than half an hour to work, music is better. Anywhere from 30-60 minutes it depends. If your drive is an hour or more, though, audiobooks can keep you sane. In fact, they can give you something to look forward to on your commute. No surprise, but I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks over the past few years.

There is more to an audiobook than some guy reading the book to you. In the good ones, the actor or actress can come up with good voices for the characters that are distinct enough that you can tell them apart even without every line ending in “he said” and “she said”. It’s also helpful to have a good voice to match the overall tone and mood of the book and/or its narrator. It’s interesting the different way that different producers have approached this:

Most Audiobooks: Have a man or woman doing the reading depending on who the narrator is or main character is. Typically, their voice works best for the main character, but the actors are versatile enough that it’s not a distraction when they’re reading other parts, regardless of gender and ethnicity. Special props go out to the narrator of Richard North Patterson’s “Protect and Defend” for being able to produce different, geographically appropriate southern accents. The main reader for most of Scott Turow’s books also has a special gift for differing voices with different ethnicities without sounding condescending or cartoonish. The one Turow book (so far) read by someone else had the absolute perfect actor for the part of the narrator. In the Discworld series, the narrator sounds like you would imagine Terry Pratchett himself sounding. That works, too.

Harry Potter Series: Read by Jim Dale or Stephen Fry, depending on which version you’re listening to. Since HP is ostensibly a series of children’s book, having a grandfatherly voice reading it works pretty well. It’s easy to overlook the man’s voice dedicated to the female characters because it’s all part of bedtime storytime as you listen.

Ender’s Game Series: This was a particularly novel approach. Each book has numerous voices reading the book. Different sections are read by different people. The ones that focus on female characters are read by women and the same for men. Though Orson Scott Card writes in the third person, it tends to be the limited third person so each one is told from the point of view of the character and the language is altered accordingly. But the female reader for the Valentine-centric scenes also reads the parts for Ender or Peter or whoever. So it’s this odd sort of thing where each character’s lines are read by half-a-dozen readers. Sometimes during dialogue is split between the actors. It’s all really skillfully done. It’s one of those things that I couldn’t imagine it working if it were described to me, but it may well be my favorite format.

Graphic Audio: Graphic Audio bills itself as a “movie in your mind” so it’s only one-part audiobook while being another part radio show. Unlike most audiobooks, there are sound effects and music. There are a lot of actors and each of the main characters seems to get their own and the narrator is a voice unto himself. But unlike a radio show, there is description of action. The narration and music makes for a really neat combination and makes what would seem difficult (putting a comic book to audio) very compelling.

Old-Time and BBC Radio: When I was a kid I was a big fan of old radio shows that would come on a local news radio channel from 8-10 on Sunday nights. For my birthday I would get Shadow cassettes. I enjoyed them greatly, but without narration it’s a tough format. Particularly for anything that has action, wherein you’re left with characters saying things like “Look, he’s going at Jerry with a knife! Keep evading him, Jerry! Go! Go! Go!” Interestingly enough, this could be the type of broadcast that I would be most suitable to write since I’ve always been very dialogue-driven, but it’s really a small sandbox with which to work.