The joy of audiobooks

The last month I have been a payed sibscriber to Audible.com, one of the few Audio book websites.
Many geeks prefer audible because it has very good and easy integration with Itunes, which I am thankfull for aswell.

My recent interest in material regarding atheism, rationality, science history and moral philosophy has found exppression in several sites I have been following of late, several podcasts I have subscribed to, and of course the audio books I first gave a try.

In some cases I have bought or wish to buy books that I already own. The main reason for that is practicality. For example “A Short History of nearly Everything” I have in hardback, which I am hardly going to take on the train with me.
The other major reason is that I love it when the authors themselves narrate the audiobook. I especially enjoyed Richard Dawkins in this, with “The God Delusion”, but the same goes for several other writers. Not all narrate their own books though, of course.

Audiobooks are the ultimate conveniant way for me to experience books. I dont have the time, or am not willing to make the time, to read them at home, and I have plenty of time during my commute to and from work to cover a lot of literary work in this way.

I have actually found myself browsing book sections of shops now, to find books that I then search for online. The only problem with this, is that Audible’s selection is somewhat limited, and some books they cannot, for some reason, sell outside of the US. Have to find a way around that somehow.

Here are the ones I have bought in the last 2 months:

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A Short History of Nearly Everything

Unabridged

Bill Bryson

Narrated by

William Roberts

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson’s quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. He takes subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry, and particle physics, and aims to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists, Bill Bryson reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

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The God Delusion

Unabridged

Richard Dawkins

Narrated by

Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward

Richard Dawkins invites you to imagine a world where New York’s Twin Towers still stand, where Arabs and Israelis live in peace, where the Crusades—events directly responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.2 million persons—never happened. In short, he invites you to imagine a world that would have been, and could be, without religion. That is not to say that he wishes to discard religion only because of its historical relationship to violence. This extensive, powerfully argued examination of why we believe, and the imperative of turning from Faith to Reason, has become an international best seller. It could change your life.

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God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Unabridged

Christopher Hitchens

Narrated by

Christopher Hitchens

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’ recent best-seller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty of the double helix.

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50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need To Know

Unabridged

Ben Dupre

Narrated by

Laurence Kennedy

The perfect introduction to the central ideas of philosophy now available in audio format.
Have you ever lain awake at night fretting over how we can be sure of the reality of the external world? Perhaps we are in fact disembodied brains, floating in vats at the whim of some deranged puppet-master?
If so, you are not alone – and what’s more, you are in exalted company. For this question and other ones like it have been the stuff of philosophical rumination from Plato to Popper.
In a series of accessible and engaging short lectures delivered in the deep chocolate tones of reader Laurence Kennedy, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know introduces and explains the problems of knowledge, consciousness, identity, ethics, belief, justice, and aesthetics that have engaged the attention of thinkers from the era of the ancient Greeks to the present day.

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On my wishlist I currently have the following titles: