It's the story of Colville and Francine, each around 30 years old and former childhood friends. Francine has married, and is expecting her first child in suburban Boise, Idaho. Colville lives in a trailer but turns up on Francine's doorstep when a news story about a neighbor's missing child mysteriously inspires him to seek her out.

What Colville and Francine share, and what Francine's apprehensive husband, Wells, can begin to fathom, is their past as members of a reclusive religious sect planning for the imminent end of the world. Francine's father helped build the underground compound where the sect expected to ride out a nuclear holocaust, and Colville's beloved younger brother was regarded as a chosen one, destined for some great mission. (Instead, he became a soldier and was killed in Afghanistan.) How exactly the sect fell apart is revealed gradually, and the novel's action culminates in striking passages describing a visit to the groups now-deserted subterranean shelter.

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John Keating's narration of Jim Crace's "Harvest" falls into the latter category. His eminently pleasant voice, with an Irish lilt that he turns up and down at will, is more or less the same whatever book he's reading. In the case of "Harvest," a deceivingly simple account of the implosion of a small rural community, it is exactly the right voice to convey a story with some of the qualities of a fairy tale. Small things here have big meanings, and Keating, who imparts the flavor of a bedtime story to the proceedings, adds to the novel's archetypal resonance.

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Or so I thought until I stumbled upon Guy Gavriel Kay's "Under Heaven," a bewitching tale set in the invented country of Kitai, which is closely patterned after Tang Dynasty China. It was a meeting shaped by audiobooks, since what I was looking for when I found it was a long multi-character story read by my favorite narrator, Simon Vance. Vance has taken me through a dozen books by Anthony Trollope, the entire "A Dance to the Music of Time" sequence by Anthony Powell and miscellaneous other novels by Dickens, Hilary Mantel and V.S. Naipaul. To my ear, he strikes exactly the right balance between distinct characters and the unified sensibility of a third-person omniscient narrator. When I crave the pleasure of being entirely enveloped in the imaginary world of a long novel, I want Vance to read it to me.

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The framing device of this novel is a self-help manual, but it's easy to make way too much of that. Hamid pretends to tell "you," a young man born in a poor village in what appears to be Pakistan, advice on how to parlay "your" natural talents into wealth amid a society of breathtaking ruthlessness and striving. Of course, chances are close to nil that you are such a person, or that you've picked up this book looking for any such advice. Rather, the self-help feint allows Hamid to smoothly adopt the second-person -- a writerly choice that usually registers as painfully self-conscious or presumptuous (see: "Bright Lights, Big City").

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The most striking thing about all this reading  and listening is how few of these books and audiobooks have taken up any kind of long-term residence in my mind and in my life – how few have troubled me so that I think about them months and years after I thought I had finished my time with them, and how few have brought pleasure or solace of the sort that cause me to want to reread them.

If I tried to categorize what it is that gives these books their special staying power, the first thing I might do is make a list of the qualities that — surprisingly — aren’t sources of this power. It’s not the subject or the content, although subject and content that is inherently interesting or dramatic can go a long way toward helping a book be interesting or dramatic.  It’s not timeliness, although I’m always happy to spend time with a book that has something to say to the present moment. And it’s not the events the book offers, although I’m drawn to a book that offers a series of interesting events.

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How sad to think I might never get the chance to revisit it! (The list of older books I plan to read once I "retire" is probably longer than the list of books I've already read.) Then I came across the audiobook, an option made irresistible by the fact that it is narrated by Neville Jason, whose sensitive rendering of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" has helped me get past the famous second-book hump in that series of novels. The ideal place to revisit White's masterpiece: Lying in bed in the dark at night, with my iPhone set to turn itself off in a half hour. Soon, however, I found myself squeezing in bits of listening as I waited for the bus or baked a friend's birthday cake.

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The ease of an audiobook can sometimes nudge a foot-dragging reader over these inexplicable hurdles. I've been intending to read the novels of Charles Portis for ages. Everything I'd heard about this "writers' writer" suggested his books would delight me. I loved both film versions of his best-known novel, "True Grit," and my most discerning friends swear by the rest. Donna Tartt, author of "The Secret History" and "The Little Friend," rhapsodized about "True Grit" in an afterword included in an edition published in the mid-2000s, describing it as one of "the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime."

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Laura Miller can not put down James Lasdun's haunting memoir, "Give Me Everything You Have," which recounts being stalked by a former protégé:

"In his remarkable 2002 novel, 'The Horned Man,' an academic estranged from his wife goes quietly mad while serving on his college’s sexual harassment committee, imagining that the department’s most legendary womanizer is secretly living in his office and sabotaging his life. Take a writer like this, one who specializes in the surreal, inward spiraling of paranoia, and make him the target of a clever stalker: It sounds like the premise of a James Lasdun novel, right? However, 'Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked,' Lasdun’s new book, is not a novel, but a memoir."

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In a similar, if more elevated, vein, a BBC dramatization of the four Ford Madox Ford novels collectively known as "Parade's End" will arrive on American television at the end of the month. (HBO will air the miniseries beginning on Feb. 26.) The screenplay is by Tom Stoppard, and Benedict Cumberbatch, of "Sherlock" fame, stars. "Downton" comparisons will abound, though some viewers will be disappointed to find "Parade's End" lacks a mansion and wisecracking old ladies -- not to mention the complete absence of attention paid to the servant class.

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But there is still time, and the publication of the audiobook edition of “Notes From No Man’s Land” is one opportunity to wave the flag again, and to say to readers: Pay attention. We live among a literary landscape that is so cluttered with passing next big things that it is possible to miss the truly important things that appear at first glance to be small, but which prove themselves over time to make a lasting home in the memory and moral conscience of their readers.

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But is Mickey really as crazy as she keeps insisting, or as impervious to the emotions of those around her? Although she's the rare disturbed narrator who seems completely reliable (part of her claim to fame is her brutal honesty), the novel hinges on the reader's slowly dawning suspicion that she might be a lot saner than even she realizes.

Technically, "My Second Death" is a psychological thriller. It begins with Mickey receiving a cryptic message at the university where she works as a grad student in medieval literature. The message includes a quote from Nietzsche and the address of a derelict house. When Mickey investigates she finds a mutilated corpse. At first, she suspects Aidan, an artist acquaintance of her older brother who asks her to help him unearth the circumstances of his mother's death ten years earlier and who lives across the street from the house where she discovered the body. To learn more about him, Mickey decides to fill the vacancy left by his last roommate. The idea that she should be afraid of Aidan doesn't seem to occur to her; Mickey is accustomed to thinking of herself as the dangerous one.

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As a straight married man who has never spent any time as a straight single woman looking for love, I approached “I Don’t Care About Your Band,” Klausner’s darkly comic memoir of dating, as a kind of dispatch from a secret and enticing land.

Among the things I learned while listening:

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For me, it's time and eye strain. For ages I've been meaning to finish Marcel Proust's "The Remembrance of Things Past" (now more commonly translated as "In Search of Lost Time," but I'm going to stick with the titles as translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, as that's the version I'm listening to). To date, I've yet to get past the second volume, "Within a Budding Grove," in print, but I have high hopes that, by switching to audiobooks, I can vault through the whole sequence of seven novels by the end of 2013 (despite needing to review at least one new book per week for my day job). After all, that's how I've consumed all five doorstops in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series (the basis for HBO's "Game of Thrones") and Anthony Powell's famously Proustian 12-volume "A Dance to the Music of Time," deliciously read by Simon Vance.

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The foundation for those books was laid in Vietnam itself, where he began writing his first book, “If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,” a memoir, in the last hour or two of daylight, from the foxhole he had dug to keep himself alive, a story he recounts in an interview bundled with the newly released 40th anniversary audiobook edition of the memoir. By the end of his tour, he had accumulated, by his count, 30 or 40 handwritten pages, which represented the beginning of a lifelong reckoning with what O’Brien now calls “that terrible decision”: “What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I’m still struggling with it, 40 years later.”

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Previously, the only audiobook versions of most of Waugh's celebrated novels -- from "Vile Bodies" to the colonial parody "Set Out More Flags" -- were so severely abridged that they made no sense at all. (An exception was Jeremy Irons' recording of Waugh's most popular book, "Brideshead Revisited.") This was ridiculous; the new unabridged audiobook version of "Scoop" -- just released with 12 other Waugh titles to coincide with handsome new print editions from Little, Brown -- is less than seven hours long, substantially shorter than most other audio titles. There's not a lot of fat in Waugh's fiction, and cutting any of it is a crime against the reader.

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Hodgman's very funny compendiums of bogus facts and advice would seem to present a particular challenge for audiobook adapters; the books are full of charts, tables and sidebars, along with amusing uses of typography and illustrations. A daily countdown of events culminating in the Dec. 21 climax of Ragnarok appears inside a little box on each printed page of "That Is All." The solution: Create a distinct recorded version, using the book as a rough guide. This, perhaps, explains why the audiobook was released this fall, a full year after the print edition. Without a doubt, the true Hodgmaniac will want to own both.

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The short version of Hitchens’s answer: Me.

His longer version: The implied question “Is nothing sacred?” must always be answered “with a stoical ‘No.’”

This fierce stance was central to Hitchens’s work, and now that he has been dead for a year, and Mother Teresa has been dead for 15 years, the reissue of "The Missionary Position" as an audiobook is less an opportunity to revisit the history of their disagreement (his explicit, hers implicit) than it is an opportunity to remember the value of Hitchens’s great pugnacious willingness to examine, in cold detail, the things the culture has enshrined, and to “scorn to use the fear of death to coerce and flatter the poor.”

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The action mostly takes place stateside, with the title character and his fellow members of the so-called "Bravo squad" making a victory lap through several U.S. cities sometime in the mid-2000s. The soldiers have executed a heroic action in the vicinity of Fox News cameras, and they've been embraced as "real-life American heroes" by the nation. It's Thanksgiving by the time their tour delivers them to a football game in Dallas, the throbbing epicenter of red-blooded, know-nothing, gimcrack patriotism, and 19-year-old Billy has already learned to zone out when people start shaking his hand and talking about "our freedoms." Like the rest of the Bravos, he just wants to meet a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, or better yet, Destiny's Child, who will also be performing on the field at halftime.

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