If you’re someone who listens to audiobooks, do you ever pay attention to who the narrator or performer is? Sometimes an author will narrate their own audiobook, and sometimes for bigger releases, there may be a whole cast who performs the audiobook. But if you listen to enough audiobooks, you start to develop a taste for what you like in a voice that will be carrying you through a story or laying out some information.
Personally, my favorite audiobook narrator is Bahni Turpin. I enjoy listening to the way she speaks in general and how she distinguishes different characters without doing an exaggerated “voice” for each of them. Even if I may not have picked up the audiobook otherwise, I will consider listening to pretty much anything if I find out Bahni Turpin is the narrator.
Did you know that you can search our audiobooks or eAudiobooks for a certain narrator? You can do this in the general catalog search, and you will bring up the audiobooks by narrator since the name is listed under “Performers” and/or “Additional Contributors” in the record. You can also search the name of an eAudiobook narrator in Libby/Overdrive or Hoopla, and you will see all the eAudiobooks available with that narrator.
So if you listen to an audiobook and find you really like the way it was narrated, try searching for more with that same narrator! If you want to try out my own favorite narrator, here are a few of Bahni Turpin’s performances that I’ve really enjoyed:
The Hate U Give [CD] [also eAudio on Overdrive/Libby] [also eAudio on Hoopla] by Angie Thomas (2017), 11 hour, 45 minutes. – This is the story of a teenage girl who witnesses the police shooting of her friend, and it was recently made into a movie.
So You Want to Talk About Race [Playaway] [also eAudio on Overdrive/Libby] [also eAudio on Hoopla] by Ijeoma Oluo (2020), 7 hour, 30 minutes. – In this bestseller in nonfiction for adults, Oluo muses and instructs on many different facets of race in America and how we can talk about it constructively.
The True Meaning of Smekday [CD] [also eAudio on Overdrive/Libby] by Adam Rex (2010), 10 hour, 38 minutes. – In our children’s section, this wacky science fiction story was the inspiration for the movie Home, where aliens take over planet Earth.
Happy listening!
-Teresa Moulton, Public Service Leader
