In which I introduce myself as an audiobook aficionado and offer my faves of the year.

For our first post on Audio Book Week 2011, Devourer of Books asks us:

Are you new to audiobooks in the last year? Have you been listening to them forever but discovered something new this year? Favorite titles? New times/places to listen? This is your chance to introduce yourself and your general listening experience.

I've been listening to audiobooks since they were cassette tapes; our kitchen counter always sported a "boom box" with some tape or another offering a novel or non-fiction read to keep us company while cooking dinner or doing dishes, and I can't really recall a time when listening to books wasn't a part of my life.

I can't say that I invented new occasions or techniques for book-listening this year: in fact, I stopped listening to audiobooks at the gym in favor of reading them.  But perhaps for next year I will try to enhance variety and extend my skills with audio books:  Listening while standing on my head?  Reading one book while listening to another?  Listening "backwards" - first CD last & last first?  Start figuring out how to sync my iTouch up with the ever-changing Apple software and then get a kit for my car?  What say ye?  Time to get creative!

But I will allow that I'm a near-constant car listener, and in fact wax quite bereft when I lack a strong performance to enliven my daily commutes.  Sure, I enjoy listening to the radio or to music while driving, but when I consider how much there is to read, and that I teach ninth grade English so I need to keep current on both Y.A. and adult titles, well, audiobooks are primo NET (No Extra Time) sources of both personal enrichment and professional development.  So I am rarely without a set of CDs in my little white Golf.  And somebody shoulda brought a camera the morning I woke up to find that my car stereo had been stolen.  Egads!  Hyperventilation-ville!  I feel certain it wasn't pretty.  But three hours and one trip to Best Buy later, I was back in business with a new Blaupunkt.  And I've been locking my car doors ever since.

I've quite recently begun to blog about audiobooks; you'll find the posts at the bottom of the "This Year's Books, Ratings" page tab above as well as under "what she read - audio books" in the postings by category at right.  I'm trying for one per week now, with at least three in the queue for this week's special celebration.

My favorite of 2011 so far would have to be Ron Silver narrating Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, simply because Silver was such an astonishing actor and his voice is so distinctive.  It ranks right up there with my favorite audiobook performance of all time: Aasif Mandvi (yes, he of The Daily Show fame) reading Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown.  And then there's Sherman Alexie reading his own Indian Killer and Kaye Gibbons reading her own The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster... But I'm getting ahead of myself as our ultimate faves are to be shared on Thursday...

My Y.A. favorite this year is definitely Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why, dually narrated by Debra Wiseman and Joel Johnstone.  Although I'm not always a fan of multiple readers on audio books, their performances illuminate and engross, elevating the novel itself and deepening its impact.  If you have a teen friend in your life, they're pretty likely to read this, so why not give it a listen? 

What's your favorite audio book of the year?  (And as above, it doesn't have to be released this year, just "read" by you.)  I'm looking to build me a list of TBL's!

MFB,
L              

p.s.  Go check out the Audio Book Week bloggers at Devourer of Books for more ideas...