In 1955, Listening Library released the first audiobook ever produced in the United States.
The book was Around the World in Eighty Days. Fifty years later, Jim Dale recorded a new edition of the same title as a tribute to that first recording. Steam trains hiss in the background. An orchestra opens each chapter. When the ship reaches the storm, you hear the wind.
These are not podcasts. They are productions. In the tradition of old radio, when a family pulled chairs around a single speaker and listened together. The recordings on this list have full musical scores, sound design, and casts of performers. Children’s literature, set to music, performed by the best actors alive.
A great audiobook closes the gap between a four-year-old and her grandfather. Both will laugh when Stockard Channing voices Ramona. Both will hold their breath when Alfred Molina becomes Long John Silver. Both will hear the same Sherlock Holmes, in the same voice, at the same moment, in the same room.
The first part of our series ran last week. The response was exuberant and the comments are full of more great titles. The reader favorites post is coming after part three.
If you missed it: The 30 Greatest Children’s Audiobooks Ever Recorded: Part One.
Ten more recordings by decorated voices follow below. Press play.
11. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, narrated by Nick Offerman
Nick Offerman, the actor most people know from Parks and Recreation, is from Illinois and grew up next to the Mississippi. His baritone gives the river the voice it needs. AudioFile said the book is “a classic he was meant to read.” Pair it with the Elijah Wood Huckleberry Finn from Part One for a full summer of Twain.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
12. Around the World in Eighty Days, narrated by Jim Dale
Verne’s 1872 adventure, read by Jim Dale, the voice of Harry Potter. The 2005 recording commemorated Listening Library’s fiftieth anniversary as a publisher. The first audiobook the company ever produced, in 1955, was Around the World in Eighty Days. Dale’s edition is its tribute.
Phileas Fogg. Passepartout. The wager at the Reform Club. The trains, the steamships, the elephants. The original race against the clock.
13. Peter Pan, narrated by Jim Dale
One more from Dale. J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel of the boy who would not grow up, read by the man who has spent a lifetime making children believe in fairies.
This is not the Disney version. This is the original, with all its strangeness, its beauty, its shadow.
Read it before they see the movies.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
14. The Jungle Book: The Mowgli Stories, full-cast dramatization with Bill Bailey, Richard E. Grant, Tim McInnerny, and Celia Imrie
Rudyard Kipling’s stories of Mowgli, Bagheera, Baloo, and Shere Khan, in a full-cast Audible production that won the 2016 Audie Award for Best Audio Drama and the 2016 Audie Award for Excellence in Production. Bill Bailey plays Baloo. Richard E. Grant plays Kaa.
This is not the cartoon. The original Jungle Book is a story about loyalty, courage, and the law of the pack. It is wilder and stranger than the Disney version, and your kids will love it more.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
15. Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection, narrated by Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry, the actor and writer who has been a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London since his teenage years, recorded the complete Conan Doyle canon for Audible in 2017. Four novels. Fifty-six short stories. Seventy-one hours and fifty-seven minutes of listening. He also wrote and narrated nine original introductions, one for each volume. The recording won an AudioFile Earphones Award.
For a kid old enough for mystery, there is no better introduction to the form.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
16. Treasure Island, narrated by Alfred Molina
Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 pirate masterpiece, read by Alfred Molina, a Tony nominee for the Broadway production of Art. The recording won the AudioFile Earphones Award and was named AudioFile’s Best Audiobook of 2007. AudioFile called it “a brand-new classic.” Long John Silver. Squire Trelawney. Blind Pew. The original X marks the spot.
This is the book that invented half of pirate fiction.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
17. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, narrated by Anne Hathaway
L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Chicago in 1900. The Audible publisher’s note calls it “a uniquely American fairy tale.” Academy Award-winning Anne Hathaway records the audiobook. AudioFile called her narration “masterful” and the recording “definitive.” It was an Audie Award Finalist for Solo Narration, Female, in 2013.
Kansas, the prairie, a girl with a dog who keeps her wits about her in a kingdom that has lost its. There is no more American children’s story than this one.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
18. The Little Prince, narrated by Richard Burton
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince in New York in 1942 and 1943, while exiled from Nazi-occupied France. The book was published in the United States before it was published anywhere else in the world. Richard Burton recorded the audiobook on April 25, 1974, with a full cast that included Jonathan Winters, John Carradine, Jim Backus, and Claudine Longet. The recording won the 1975 Grammy Award for Best Children’s Recording.
Burton’s Welsh voice is one of the great voices of the twentieth century. The Los Angeles Times called this “one of the most treasurable audio recordings ever made.”
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
19. Black Beauty, narrated by Simon Vance
Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel told from the perspective of a horse. It changed the way England treated working animals when it was published, and it remains one of the most quietly powerful books ever written for young people. Simon Vance has won seventeen Audie Awards, holds more Audie nominations for single-voiced narration than any other male narrator, has earned more than seventy-five AudioFile Earphones Awards, and is a member of the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
20. The Borrowers, narrated by Christopher Eccleston
Mary Norton’s 1952 novel about Pod, Homily, and Arrietty, the tiny family who live under the kitchen floor. Christopher Eccleston is one of the most respected British stage and screen actors of his generation, an Olivier nominee, the Ninth Doctor on Doctor Who, and a working presence on serious drama from The Leftovers to the Royal Shakespeare Company. His 2017 Penguin recording is the complete unabridged edition.
For a young listener, the world the Borrowers inhabit, made of thimbles and matchboxes and postage stamps, is one of the most enchanting things in children’s literature.
🎧 Listen on Audible
📖 Buy the book
Part Three arrives next week. The list ends with Johnny Tremain.
If I missed an audiobook your family has loved, drop it in the comments. I am keeping a running list and the reader favorites post is coming after part three.
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Redwall-Brian Jacques
The incredible Journey-Sheila Burnford
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wild.
Always made me cry even as an adult.