I have recently had two very drastically different experiences with audiobooks. The first was Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, about a popular girl at school who dies in a car crash and relives the last day of her life over and over, trying to fix what she has broken. The second was The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, about a boy who lives in a place called Prentisstown*, a settlement on an alien planet where all of the women were killed by a mysterious illness and all the men can read each others' thoughts.
Before I Fall was a book that had come highly recommended online and by readers I knew. I was excited when the audiobook came in and immediately started listening in my car. I wasn't surprised that the book didn't grab me right away, some books take a while to grow on you, but after disk five, of eight, I began to get worried. The reader was fine when she was speaking as the main character (Sam) but all of the other characters were too exaggerated. For instance: all of Sam's friends spoke with a stupid valley girl accent, despite the fact that they were from a small Connecticut town. I think perhaps this is how she assumed teenagers talk, although I have never heard anyone that annoying that wasn't on Jersey Shore. As I got toward the end of the book, I realized that I didn't care about a single one of them, every time the day ended I hoped that would be the end of it. The reader put emphasis on strange parts of the story, was overly dramatic when the scene called for a calm voice, and overall was just too... too... too much (for lack of a better descriptor)! She was over the top all the time, and couldn't seem to find a subtle way to get a point across. For the last couple discs I tried to imaging what the story would be like if I were reading it myself rather than having it read to me, and I decided that I would probably have liked the book a lot more if I had been able to act out Sam and her friends in my head. The reader made it difficult for me to see why this book came so highly recommended.
Not long after finishing Before I Fall they announced the winner and honor books for the Odyssey Award (given for excellence in audibook adaptation). One of the books on the list, The Knife of Never Letting Go, was something I had picked up about a year ago and tried to read, but just couldn't get past the first couple chapters without getting bored. I dropped it and never came back until I saw the announcement about the award. I immediately checked out the audiobook and started it a few days ago and it is AMAZING! The reader, Nick Podehl, is someone I have listened to before, and he makes the characters, that I couldn't relate to when I read it on my own, really come alive. If you want an example of audiobook narration at it's best check out anything by Nick Podehl
*The only downside to audiobooks is that I had to look up how to spell this since I had only ever heard it.