Good Audio Books to Listen to in the Car

There is nothing better on a long journey than to listen to an audio book. There is something special about listening to a book on CD together as a family. This is a list of books we have listened to together as a family and have especially enjoyed. I particularly like the ones that are dramatized and I find if the BBC produces an audio version, then it's good quality to listen to.

Redwall Series

The heroes are mice, the enemies rats, the surroundings an abbey. The series of Redwall books contains bravery, valor and all the things that go into a good medieval story of knights with honor. We reached about 15 books in the Redwall series before my children decided they were too old for them any more, I don't know how many more were written after that.

These books were written for children in a blind school, so the descriptions are superb. You can really imagine being in the abbey in the books. They are read by the author with an accent from Liverpool, England which just adds to the charm of the books.

This book has to be listened to and not read as it's read by a black person and he has the right accent. The whole book is hilariously funny, with an underlying wonderful plot of a boy trying to find his father. The boy is young and innocent, which totally adds to the charm.

The Watsons go to Birmingham - 1963 is written by the same author and is almost as good, but of all the children's books I've read my all time favorite is Bud, not Buddy.

There are a lot of Hank the Cowdog books, and I think we listened to them all. Hank takes his job as Head of Ranch Security very seriously and the animals get into lots of scrapes and adventures. You can listen to these in any order as each book is a stand alone story.

These are aimed for the Kindergartener/1st Grader, and while Junie B is very cute and my children loved listening to them, I as a parent was glad when that phase of listening came to an end. I think my daughter read the last few because I declared I'd listened to enough.

I read this in my teens and loved it, so I was very glad when my children reached the age where they were interested and we could listen to it together. This is a superbly dramatized version produced by the BBC with multiple actors taking parts. They did the Lord of the Rings too, but I never got round to listening to it.

 Yet again another dramatized book excellently done by the BBC. We did the whole series as a read aloud, and while The Lion, the Wtich and the Wardrobe was well received, some of the other books had less enthusiastic supporters.

This book also has to be listened to and not read. The main character is Indian and the book is read by a person with an Indian voice. It makes the story so much more realistic. We started listening to this in the car and it didn't initially draw me into the story, but the more I listened, the more I was hooked. By the end of the book I was planning a trip just to listen to the end of it. This is one of my forever favorite books, I'm planning on reading it again in the future and I don't do that with many books.

 This would be a great book to start a homeschool unit study with. It had me looking up artists and mathematical concepts. The story line is one of mystery and adverture written for late elementary, nevertheless, I was hooked from beginning to end.

 This book is aimed for middle schoolers or high schoolers. It's the story of a boy and an old black man who are surviving together first on a raft and then on an island. The audio book is very well done with each character having individual voices.

 In all my homeschooling years I have read a lot of books with my children, and E L Konigsburg has become one of my favorite authors. Many of her books, however, have a more mature theme. This book is for younger readers and contains a mystery that the children must solve.

 There are a number of Freddy the Pig books, and these are just a few. These books are really funny and a number of times we laughed out loud at Freddy's adventures. These are aimed at lower elementary children, but are also fun for adults too.

Don't listen to this while driving, or you will come to a point in the story where you will be crying and will have to pull over because you are unable to drive. Not that I'm giving the ending away, but we read lots of books about dogs before realizing the dog always dies at the end of the book. Then I discovered No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman and Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. These are the only two dog books I know of where the dog doesn't die. So be warned, if you want to read a dog book.

 Jim Weiss is a wonderful storyteller and we have listened to a lot of the books he has narrated. Everything, without exception, was wonderful. Here are just a few.

My children loved this series, but as a Lord of the Rings fan, I found it too similar and gave up half way through the first book. I was told that the books got better, but I didn't try again. The movie, however, was a disappointment. But the third book in the Inheritance Trilogy was about the first book that I ever preordered we were so keen to get it. And I bought it on CD. My children just wouldn't wait months for the library to get it.