Let’s Talk Bookish: All About Audiobooks

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022, with Dini at Dini Panda Reads as co-host from February 2025.

Let’s Talk Bookish June 20th:
All About Audiobooks
(Jillian @ Jillian the Bookish Butterfly)

Prompts: Do you like to read audiobooks? Where do you typically get audiobooks? Do you have any favorite narrators, or platforms for listening to them? Do you find it easy to access audiobooks, or can it be more challenging compared to ebooks and physical books?

I do like audiobooks! I tend to get mine from Audible, typically using credits. I don’t tend to get them based on narrators, so I don’t always have particular ‘favourites’, but I definitely feel a narrator can make or break an audiobook. I really liked Santino Fontana’s narration of A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and have picked up another book because he narrates it.

Similarly, if I do like a narrator, I will look out for other books they’ve narrated. Though I also quite enjoy when actors with long-running characters narrate books ‘by’ the character, like Diane Morgan narrating The World According to Cunk, by Philomena Cunk, or Matthew Holness narrating books ‘by’ Garth Marenghi.

I find it much harder to browse for audiobooks via Audible, and I find more often than not I need to know what book I want as an audiobook before looking. I think I’m more likely to ask for audio recommendations, too, or request recommendations when I’m lining up my next audio read. Often, I’ll spend some time looking online specifically for audiobook suggestions from others, as the audiobook can also be such a different experience than the book itself.

That said, another thing I sometimes do is pick up the audiobook of a book I’ve previously read and loved, just to experience it in a different way. It can be really interesting to find an all cast version of a book or even just a single narration and get different ideas from the book.

What about you – are you an audiobook reader? How do you find your audiobooks?