The 10 Best Audiobooks of All Time, Ranked
Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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You heard of books? Pages, words on the pages, you flip the pages, you digest the story. Yeah? Simple? Okay, you heard of audio? Stuff that hits your ears (no time for the science of it all) and stuff you hear? Got it? Cool! Combine audio and books. What do you know? Audiobooks. Stuff you'd usually read that, suddenly, you don’t have to actually read.
Some people who really value reading and the act of purchasing a physical book might scoff at the idea of listening to one, but if you don’t have the time to sit down all that often, or if you have to commute and looking at words on a page gives you motion sickness, then audiobooks can be a great way to catch up on reading. Ideally, you'll have a physical copy present as well, but that can be expensive and is really only needed if you're reading something complex. If you like – or can get used to – the idea of listening to a book more so than reading one, then the following titles are worth checking out, because they all rank among the very best audiobooks ever recorded.
10 'L.A. Confidential' (1990)
Various books written by James Ellroy have been narrated by Jeff Harding, and his voice is just a perfect match for the sort of stuff Ellroy writes. Picking out the best book both worked on (in their different ways) is hard, but L.A. Confidential is one of the best James Ellroy novels, and its complexity also meant it would've been a greater undertaking, as a narrator, than something a little shorter (and technically simpler) like Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.
Trying to summarize L.A. Confidential is never easy, but if you want the basics, there are crimes, there are several point-of-view characters, and then there are tons of other supporting characters who may or may not be wrapped up in several different (and possibly related) conspiracies. The narration here also goes a while toward making the 1950s setting more immersive, and it does also serve to make this distinctly Los Angeles-heavy story all the more cinematic.
9 'Mason & Dixon' (1997)
You’ve got almost 34 hours of audio here, which is perhaps a little more digestible than purely reading 700+ pages, especially when the style of Mason & Dixon is as out-there as it is. Thomas Pynchon has his other long and dense novels, sure, but Mason & Dixon is being singled out here because the style of it all is unique and sometimes hard to read, and because the language is deliberately antiquated.
Steven Crossley... does a rather phenomenal job of making something dense and distinctly Pynchonian close to digestible.
It does the whole story-within-a-story thing, being about some real-life people, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon and their work on what came to be known as the Mason–Dixon line, but also about some people telling that whole real-life story in an over-the-top way. If you listen to the narration by Steven Crossley, he does a rather phenomenal job of making something dense and distinctly Pynchonian close to digestible.
8 'Born to Run' (2016)
Bruce Springsteen does like to talk quite a bit, at his concerts, and that talking isn't the reason why they're known to go for three hours or longer sometimes, but they contribute. Thankfully, he knows how to talk, and how to tell a story, be it through a song or by monologuing. Springsteen on Broadway is a good concert film that shows this, if you’ve not seen him live before.
If you want just Springsteen talking, though, and more autobiographical details without the songs, then he’s also written the memoir Born to Run. Reading Born to Run normally is also very engaging, but listening to Springsteen himself narrate it makes the stories all the more engaging. It’s fairly common for living entertainers to serve as their own narrators when it comes to doing audiobook recordings, but few put in the same amount of effort as Springsteen reading this particular memoir of his.
7 'Infinite Jest' (1996)
It’s worth stressing that there are two different audiobook versions of Infinite Jest, as one is everything but the endnotes. Now, that one without the endnotes is still 56 hours long, which is a mammoth audiobook in its own right, but the stuff in the endnotes could fill a whole other novel. So, if you don’t have a physical copy of the book, or if you don’t get the audiobook version with the endnotes, you're missing out on about eight hours’ worth of stuff.
You might not be able to understand all of Infinite Jest if you listen to 64 hours versus 56, but the longer one is the complete experience, and the audiobook itself honestly does a solid job at making sure you know whether you're listening to the “normal” part of the book or one of the many endnotes. Sean Pratt narrates the whole complex novel throughout with what feels like surprising ease, and his performance and the structuring of such a complex novel making the jump to the audiobook format… like, it all really works, better than you might anticipate and/or fear.
6 'Empire of Pain' (2021)
Empire of Pain is a book about a very distressing subject, though that’s a broad statement you can make about a good many remarkable works of non-fiction. The main subject here is the Sackler family, tracking what they did over decades/generations in playing a role in the opioid epidemic, which might be thought of as a 21st-century problem, but Empire of Pain shows the roots go back way, way further.
Also troubling: the idea it’s still a problem. Empire of Pain manages to be about the past, the troubling present, and the uncertain/frightening future. If that sounds like a downer, that’s because it is, but it’s so well-written, being Patrick Radden Keefe’s arguable masterpiece to date. He clearly knows his stuff, and so him also being the narrator of the audiobook version ends up adding even more authority to the already powerful words he’s written on the page.
5 'Trainspotting' (1993)
To a greater extent than Mason & Dixon, Trainspotting is written in a way that can be fairly hard to follow if you're not always sure what the various slang terms are meant to mean. The same can also be said about A Clockwork Orange, but at least none of these books go as far into obscurity, when it comes to language, as something like the infamous novel Finnegans Wake (by James Joyce).
There’s slang used here, and all the dialogue and narration is written in a way to represent how the characters sound. So, if you listen to the Trainspotting audiobook, with narration by Thomas Dean Burn, it makes the whole thing a bit more digestible. There are “clues,” so to speak, in how he says certain things, and the meanings of other strange words or phrases get a little less strange. The book’s still something that has to be praised, but the audiobook might well be the key you also have to utilize in order to unlock said impressive book.
4 'Lolita' (1955)
Well, it’s Lolita. It’s a hard book to talk about. But it’s a bit easier to go on about the narration here, because the audiobook performed by Jeremy Irons is immense, and adds so much to all the humor, horror, and uneasiness of Lolita. All the things you're supposed to feel, whether you want to or not, are enhanced by having an all-time great voice narrating the whole thing.
Irons also played the character who goes by “Humbert Humbert” in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita, which had its issues as an adaptation, but almost any Lolita adaptation is going to have one problem or another. It’s a story best-read, or if you're not particularly keen on reading, then you're in luck, because it’s a story that’s arguably even better served by being narrated by someone as skilled as Jeremy Irons.
3 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir' (2022)
There are a fair few Werner Herzog movies and documentaries that feel underrated overall, and then the same can be said about his efforts, to date, as an author. He’s written several interesting books, with the best of them being the one that features the most (inevitably) by way of information: a fairly comprehensive memoir called Every Man for Himself and God Against All.
It’s a book where he wrote about wanting to make a movie about twin sisters, and then a few years later (2026), that came to fruition, starring Kate and Rooney Mara. Oh, and Every Man for Himself and God Against All is about so much more, speeding through a great many years of Herzog’s rather wild life, all of it done with his typically unusual choice of language (which does, naturally, get enhanced when you're listening to the man himself narrating the whole thing).
2 'The Talisman' (1984)
There are so many Stephen King books that have high-quality audiobook versions, so highlighting just one is tricky. King himself has narrated some of his novels and short stories (like Needful Things), and listening to the likes of The Stand and IT are both rewarding, but there’s an obligation to highlight something read by the late Frank Muller, because he was close to King’s go-to narrator.
Muller did four of The Dark Tower books, all the novellas in Different Seasons, and then The Talisman, plus its sequel, Black House. His performance in The Talisman is especially great, enhancing an unusual and somewhat divisive Stephen King story (one King wrote with Peter Straub, it has to be acknowledged), but what Muller does here really does just have to be heard to be believed. Same goes for the first four Dark Tower books… even when they got a bit bogged down or almost too messy for their own good, Muller would keep on carrying things forward as a narrator.
1 'The Lord of the Rings' (1954–1955)
Given its age, there are different recordings of The Lord of the Rings, but the one being highlighted here is the Andy Serkis performance. Yes, he played Gollum in the movies, and so whenever he needs to voice Gollum in the audiobook (well, technically, in one of the audiobooks, given the novel is split into three parts), he more than knocks it out of the park.
What’s a pleasant surprise, then, is Serkis doing great, memorable voices for all the other characters who speak throughout the saga. And then his narration of the non-dialogue parts (voicing J.R.R. Tolkien’s narration, essential) is also excellent throughout. Serkis does go big, as a performer here, so if you want a more low-key The Lord of the Rings experience, maybe it’s not ideal… but, like, if you want something that feels somewhere between reading a book and watching Peter Jackson’s movies, you really do get it here with the Andy Serkis narration; a possible case of the best of both worlds.
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