I've been hearing a lot of praise regarding Jeff Hays for his narration of Dungeon Crawler Carl recently, to the point where I'm holding off reading it just because I might rather want to listen to it.
The last Harry Potter Full-Cast Edition released not too long ago and well, it's a whole different experience hearing it like this than it's reading it on paper. Not a single narrator but still very impressive.
So what other narrators have done this for various books in your opinion?
by IsMathScience_
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Jim Dale’s Harry Potter narration absolutely ruined me for other audiobooks for a while – dude created distinct voices for like 200+ characters and you could tell who was speaking before they even said their name. His Hagrid voice especially just became the definitive version in my head
RC Bray doing The Martian was another game changer. That book could’ve been dry as hell with all the technical stuff but he made Mark Watney feel like your smartass buddy who’s cracking jokes while literally dying on Mars. The way he delivered those log entries had me cracking up during my commute
Michael Kramer and Kate Reading tag-teaming the Stormlight Archive books is pretty solid too. They split male/female POV chapters and both nail the epic fantasy tone without making it sound overly dramatic. Kramer’s got this gruff thing down that works perfect for Kaladin’s brooding moments
The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir is masterfully voiced by Moira Quirk. I listen to them over and over again. She voices each character in such a distinct way.
I really enjoyed the Steven Pacey readings of The First Law books. I read the first two myself then switched to audio for the third, I stuck with audio for the remaining six after that.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy read by Douglas Adams himself.
R.C. Bray is a great sci fi narrator, he narrates the Expeditionary Force series and he’s perfect for it. He was my favorite narrator before I experienced Jeff Hayes. He also was the original narrator of The Martian, as somebody else recommended but there was some sort of rights issue when Audible got the rights and it was re-recorded by Wil Wheaton who does not fit the character nearly as well. If you can find the Bray version somewhere I’d recommend it. Not sure if any libraries still have books on CD hanging around that you could listen to (or import the files from).
Andy Serkis performing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is really fun. If you don’t recognize his name, he’s the actor who played Gollum in the movies. He was cast in the movies because he was a voice actor, so not only does he do the “Gollum Voice” from the movies he brings the other characters to life really well too.
The His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman is a fantastic full-cast recording. Pullman is the narrator and usually authors reading their own books isn’t super impressive, but he’s amazing and really fits the books and the rest of the characters are well-cast too.