best audiobooks of the decade

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” The best audiobook of the decade has to be one that grabs you instantly, and with an opening sentence like that, you might be able to see why The Blind Assassin claimed the top prize. Margaret Atwood’s novel is a revelation in terms of both prose and plot. Every single word, every phrase, every paragraph is exquisite. But it’s not the kind of book that begs to be savored sentence by sentence, simply because the story is way too engaging to waste much time contemplating its construction. You simply get swept up in the mystery of what drove Laura into this ultimate act of despair, a tale that Atwood reveals layer by layer, interweaving pieces from the novel Laura had written into the present action.

You can see the complete list of the decade’s best audiobooks here. (UK version is here.) I tried to keep in mind that audiobooks are a particular kind of art form, one that’s meant to be appreciated with headphones on, or while traveling. That means they’ve gotta be more than luminously well-written: they’ve also gotta be entertaining and not too difficult to follow. Their narrators have to make the text come alive and bring new shades of meaning to it. So the list of the decade’s best books might look a lot different from the decade’s best audiobooks. On the best audiobooks list, you’ll find David Sedaris at # 7 (he’s an undeniable audiobook hero), while Atonement doesn’t appear until # 17, and Joan Didion isn’t until # 29—right next to Chuck Klosterman! Bet you don’t see that very often…

A quick note on the selection process: I purposely limited this list to books that were actually published between 2000 and 2009. There are a mind-boggling number of wonderful new recordings of older books (Jeremy Irons reads Lolita, a star-studded cast reads a Dr. Seuss collection), but I couldn’t even begin to contemplate weeding through every new edition of Pride and Prejudice or The Great Gatsby, so I put a cap on it. What did I miss?