Audio Book Recommendations for Road Trips and Long Commutes

Audio books will keep you sane on a stretch of southern mountain road where the only radio station you can tune in features someone reading obituaries out of the local newspaper. Audio books are good for long trips, trips to areas with poor radio reception, or drives of more than half an hour on the way to and from work.

You can buy audio books in bookstores or online (at sites such as Amazon.com) or purchase downloads for your MP3 player or iPod from a site such as Audible.com if you wish, but many public libraries have a good collection of audio books on CD that you may borrow at no cost. In addition, many libraries offer online digital downloads of classic titles and some recent bestsellers, as well.

Another option is to rent an audio book. Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores offer a "book-on-audio" rental program in which you buy an audio book CD at one of their locations, then return it at another location for a refund minus a $3.49 rental fee for each week you kept the CD. The Web site www.crackerbarrel.com lists store locations and boasts that there are over 200 titles available at each store.

Some excellent book titles are available only on audio cassette. If your car doesn't have an audio cassette player---and most don't anymore---you might want to pick up a few of the cassettes, anyway, and take along a portable cassette player.

Do you need some suggestions to stock your audio book road-trip book bag? Here are some of my favorites:

Fiction:

1. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, read by Jim Dale. Yes, I intended to add this to a book list for adults. If you haven't read the Harry Potter series before now, see what all the fuss is about. The Harry Potter audio books will probably be located in the children's section at your library or bookstore. Don't let that deter you from checking them out. They're fun and don't require heavy concentration, which means you can pay more attention to what is happening on the road in front of you. The storyline picks up nicely in the later books after the main character introductions are accomplished in the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Jim Dale gives an excellent audio performance of each of the novels.

2. Clive Cussler's novels, including the Dirk Pitt, NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency) and Steve Austin series. Cussler's action-adventure plots are outsized, fast-moving scenarios that remind you a bit of the James Bond and Indiana Jones set-ups. His earliest titles were The Mediterranean Caper, Iceberg and Raise the Titanic!, but you don't have to read or listen to the books in any particular order to enjoy them.

3. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. If you're a sucker for time-travel movies, shows and books (as I am), you'll love this series of brief vignettes that imagine worlds as Albert Einstein might have in 1905; worlds without time or in which time moves in a very different way that you may have ever imagined before.

4.The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. A murder in the Louvre museum that has shocking clues left by the victim leads a noted symbologist to team up with the victim's cryptographer granddaughter to solve the crime. You get all this and the Holy Grail, too.

5. Tony Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee novels about modern-day Navaho detectives at work in the American Southwest with the Navaho Tribal Police are satisfying mysteries. Good titles include Hunting Badger and The Wailing Wind.

Nonfiction:

1. Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson. This is an account of the formation, approach and landfall of the hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas in September of 1900. It is based upon what we know now and as seen through the eyes of Isaac Cline, a scientist with the young U.S. Weather Bureau who had believed hurricanes would never truly threaten the east Texas coast. It has been estimated that 6,000 to 12,000 people perished in the 1900 storm.

2. The Endurance: Shackelton's Legendary Antarctic Experience by Caroline Alexander. "Endurance" was the name of a British ship, and this book describes a brutally difficult and perilous attempt by Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men to reach the South Pole. The attempt was was thwarted in 1915 when the ship was gradually hemmed in, then crushed, by the ice pack. That marked the beginning of a grim struggle by Shackleton and his crew to return home.

3. Apollo 13 by James Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. (audio cassette). This includes snippets of the actual voice transmissions between NASA's Mission Control and the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13, "NASA's most successful failure." It's a story of courage and scientific creativity as the crew of a damaged space ship works with controllers on the ground to figure out a way to get safely back to Earth.

4. West with the Night by Beryl Markham. This is a wonderfully well-written (possibly not by Markham herself) memoir of a British woman born in 1902 and transplanted with her father in 1906 East Africa. Beryl Markham was a horse trainer and pioneer aviator, but her childhood among the native people of East Africa is especially enthralling. Of a lion attack she says, "I still have the scars of his teeth and claws, but they are very small now and almost forgotten..."

5. The Sea Hunters: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks and The Sea Hunters II, by Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo. Cussler's novels provided the funds with which he indulged his hobby of chasing old shipwrecks. As a result, he wrote a couple of fine books about the shipwrecks he searched for and usually found, including two steamboats, a Civil War submarine, the remains of the ship that rescued survivors of the Titanic and a World War II troop transport.

And More:

There are other good audio books out there, of course, and you are invited to list a favorite or two of your own in the comments section below.

Resources:

Years of listening to audio books in my car.

Amazon.com Web site: www.Amazon.com

"Cracker Barrel Old Country Store" Web site: http://www.crackerbarrel.com

Barnes and Nobel Web site: www.barnesandnoble.com