The love of listening begins with a voice.

You can read a book, of course, and that will always be a supreme pleasure. But the perfect marriage of writer and narrator is transporting in a different way. The right voice in your ear can engage you so intensely that you can’t get out of the car or off the treadmill. And you always want to get off the treadmill. 

There is no better example of this phenomenon than Alan Cumming’s narration of his second memoir, Baggage: Tales From a Fully Packed Life (HarperAudio, 8 hours and 37 minutes). Cumming is also the author of Not My Father’s Son, about his Scottish childhood with an abusive father. Baggage contains fragments of demon-wrestling, but it’s a funnier, chattier book, brimming with wit and laugh-out-loud stories about the actor/writer/LGBTQ+ activist’s life and career. Cumming is a sunny raconteur who seems barely able to hold back his mirth at times, and he delivers exactly what listeners crave in a celebrity memoir: breezy cultural gossip dispatched with an easy intimacy enhanced by the fact he’s literally tellingyou his secrets.

Cumming is blithe about taking Ecstasy the night he won a Tony Award for Cabaret. He’s got great anecdotes about luminaries from Liza Minnelli to Gore Vidal. He was in the room when the cast of X-2: X Men United staged an intervention with director Bryan Singer. He is most amused by his own poor decision-making: Tattooing the name of a man he’d known for two weeks on his thigh was not, in fact, a good idea.

Memoirs should always be read by their authors, but literary novels require a different tactic. The joy of reading a literary novel is feasting on the language and immersing yourself in the characters. That’s why the audio version of Richard Powers’ Bewilderment (Random House Audio, 7 hours and 52 minutes) feels like such a gift. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini drops the listener directly into the anxious mind of Theo Byrne, a widowed astrophysicist coping with his autistic son, Robin, and the end of the world (the usual suspects—climate change and authoritarianism—are to blame). 

As Robin’s behavior grows more erratic, Theo refuses to drug the boy, opting instead for outings in the natural world and an experimental neurological feedback program that uploads his dead wife’s brain waves into Robin’s head. Powers has done most of the heavy lifting with this wrenching story, but Ballerini’s compassionate narration opens an empathetic window onto Theo’s growing desperation. Theo becomes someone you know, and his losses hit even harder.

The right narrator takes you places, too. I recently stumbled upon Adrian McKinty’s classic Sean Duffy crime novels, set in 1980s Northern Ireland, a location you’d want to visit only via armchair travel. There are six books in the series, starting with In the Cold, Cold Ground (Blackstone Publishing, 10 hours and 4 minutes), and they offer an unsettling portrait of a country torn by violence. Reader Gerard Doyle captures every ironic twitch of McKinty’s world-weary Duffy, a Catholic cop hated by both sides of the cultural and political divide. In each note of Doyle’s narration you hear Duffy’s resignation to the madness surrounding him. The plots are riveting, but the front-row seat to Duffy’s deteriorating equilibrium makes them even better.

In the end, it all comes down to stories, I suppose. So read on. But listen, too.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.