Great Audiobooks for Road Trips

This week’s column was submitted by Joel Sawyer of Readers’ Services at the .

This has been the summer of road trips; therefore, this has been the summer of audiobooks as well. Excited vacationers have been looking for audiobooks to add adventure to their journeys.

Patrons are not looking for the hottest new audiobook titles, which are likely already checked out, they are looking for a very solid book that is currently on the shelf to while away the hours spent amidst endless mile markers and, quite possibly, multiple state lines.

A stroll through our audiobook section recently revealed a number of thrilling titles certain to take a person’s mind off their brother’s annoying snoring.

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The Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, for instance, is an intense account of a cryptic beast roaming the halls of New York City’s Museum of Natural History, intent on dining on the hypothalamus gland of the human brain for its survival.

The true gem of this book is the character Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, whose deft wit and keen factual analysis rivals those of Sherlock Holmes himself. Inexplicably, and, in my own opinion, unforgivably, Pendergast was written out of the movie version entirely.

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Another possibility to take your mind off of the fact that you’ve just finished your large soda from lunch and the next rest area is in 154 miles is One Step Behind by Henning Mankell, part of the Inspector Kurt Wallander series.

This mystery centers on the grisly murder of one of Wallander’s police force colleagues in Ystad, Sweden, which leads Kurt on an exhausting, compelling, and utterly personal hunt for the perpetrator. His brilliant deductions and snap decisions that don’t always fit inside regular police procedure lead him to answers for which he is unprepared.

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If the object is to find something for the whole family to enjoy, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien could be in order.

The story of Bilbo Baggins, his dwarf companions, the mysterious Gandalf, their quest to Lonely Mountain, the great dragon Smaug and the Battle of the Five Armies is high adventure that never fails to deliver.

With the first part of the movie version of the Hobbit coming into theaters this December, perhaps now is the appropriate time to listen to this amusing and thrilling tale.

These three audiobooks plus many more are now on the shelf at the Des Plaines Public Library. If you find some time to pick one up before you leave, you may find that the trip to Uncle Carl’s north woods cabin may be a lot shorter than you remembered!