Charlotte's Web

"Mary: One thing that’s great—even in these times where lots of audiobooks are coming out as simultaneous releases with new titles—is that publishers are also going back and revisiting classics that that are loved and cherished, like Charlotte’s Web . They’ve taken a book that many people treasure and know almost by heart and brought in not only a celebrity narrator like Meryl Streep, but also some of the very best audiobook narrators out there. This full cast production of Charlotte’s Web honours that cherished title with the very best of the best voices. It was also very nice having a title for younger children recognized as a truly stellar audiobook. Sometimes people think that audiobooks are to help kids learn to read, and not for them to fall in love with literature. But that’s what the audiobook recording of Charlotte’s Web does. It lets young kids and their parents revisit a beautiful title and fall in love with the book."

"Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon , narrated by Janet Song, would be a good fantasy series that would appeal to younger and older readers. These books draw a lot on Chinese mythology but have their own storylines, and they are good audiobooks for a broader age range. Another place I’d recommend looking is on AudioFile’s website . We have a list of book recommendations for kids broken down by age ranges . We update that periodically with newer titles, but that’s a good place to explore. It can be tricky on a road trip with the younger listeners, as a lot of the books are picture book adaptations and those are pretty short, so they don’t really make great books for long car rides. But if you look around you might find some that would work for different age ranges. For older kids, publishers continue to do great adaptations of graphic novels into audiobooks. There was a funny graphic memoir this year for young adult readers called Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy. It’s the sequel to Huda F Are You? Those are great adaptations for teens, which could be enjoyed by listeners as young as 11 and up. We’re continuing to see so many audiobooks get published, which is wonderful. I’ve been interested to see more full cast adaptations of graphic novels coming out. Graphic novels are such a good way for kids to get interested in reading because they’re so visual. Even if you don’t know what all the words are on the page you can figure out the story, so it’s a lot less intimidating than big blocks of text. It can be interesting to listen and read it at the same time, because you can see how they’ve had to adapt the audio experience. Obviously, if you’re listening, you’re not necessarily seeing what’s happening on the page; the audiobooks are recorded with the expectation that you would just be listening to it. So the audiobook producers have to figure out how to let people know who’s talking, in a way that is not intrusive: letting people know what’s going on in the graphic novel with sound effects or by describing something about where it’s set. There are factual books, too, like about how you play the Dungeons and Dragons game and other information texts. All kinds of books count as reading, and whatever kind of world you’re interested in, it’s out there for you to read and listen to."