Top 5 Wednesday: Favorite Audiobooks – Blogmas 12/2

It’s Wednesday, so time for T5W. As always, it was created by gingerreadslainey and the full list of posters can be found here in case you’re interested in joining. Today’s topic is audiobooks, which are a relatively new thing for me. So my Top 5 are basically going to be the majority I’ve listened to, period. But whatevs.

5. In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park

This is definitely the most difficult one the listen to out of the five books I’ve listed. This is a memoir written by a North Korean defector where she describes her childhood in North Korea and all the stuff she had to go through to escape it. I think the most chilling thing about this is that this stuff happened between the late 90s up through 2008 or so. It’s recent. This girl was fighting for her life, seeing her family ripped apart and being thrown from one horrible situation to the next while I was busy going to high school and reading comic books. It’s humbling and it’s worrying that stuff like this is still going on in the world. I’m still in the middle of this one, about 75% percent through it, but it’s already got me thinking about other people across the globe in a different way. Human trafficking is a big deal and it’s largely ignored in the US because most people don’t witness it day to day. It’s awful. I highly recommend you listen to or read this. Goodness, this book, man.

4. Harry Potter by JK Rowling

Any of them, really. Harry Potter was my first audio book. I heard it back when I was twelve or so, about three years after I started reading the series. My cousin had *cough*retrieved it*cough* from the internet and had me listen to it with him. I didn’t even know audiobooks existed before that so it was a magical experience to say the least. The narrator was this charming elderly man who put different voices to the different characters and just made the whole thing feel so nostalgic. I loved it.

3. A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

I chose this one because it’s what got me into the series. I had tried reading the book beforehand and kinda got lost with all the characters and locations, but when I listened to it I was able to categorize everything in my head a lot better. And because of that, I was able to read the second book – actually read it – without much difficulty.

2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

This is an audiobook that I just finished recently. It was splendid. I wrote a review on it, if you’re interested. I feel like this book is a perfect one to be narrated. It helps illustrate the atmosphere a lot better by utilizing the narrator’s tone of voice as he described it. Highly, highly recommend this one.

1. The Martian by Andy Weir

This is by far the best audiobook I’ve ever listened to. I feel like I still would have really enjoyed the book from just reading it, but listening to it, man. The narrator perfectly captures Mark Watney’s sarcasm and whit, perfectly narrates the pauses and emphasis throughout Andy Weir’s writing that I feel so many were put off by when reading it. Listening to it allows you to truly get what Weir was trying to convey using all that. This audio book. Is. Awesome. Go. Listen. To. It.

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And that’s it for this week’s TFW. :”D Two days of Blogmas down, twenty-five to go. Happy reading!