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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These titles make big promises. Implicit in them is the notion that the reader is not only going to get the science and the prurience, but also (Stiff, Spook, Bonk) a fair acquaintance with good humor, wordplay and the music language can make. When these promises pay off – and in Roach’s books, they always do – it’s more pleasure than learning, which is an extraordinary thing to say about books so packed with previously esoteric information hard won by research.

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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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For anyone interested in epic adventure tales, Laura Miller recommends “Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm,” a study of Paul du Chaillu, an explorer whose remarkable journey is part Charles Darwin, part Indiana Jones:

"This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world."

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This problem – the desire to get closer, down in the trenches of the daily life of a person who belongs to a world not one’s own – can never find its solution in television, because the medium is too distorting, and there is too much money at stake to offer the kind of screen time that a closer look would require, and, anyway, the presence of the documentary cameras would change the behavior of everyone involved so much that any hope for closeness would be dashed.

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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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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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Laura Miller dug into Candida Moss' scholarly work on Christianity's obsession with martyrdom, titled "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom." She writes:

"Moss is thorough, strives for clarity and is genuinely fired up in her concern for the influence of the myth of martyrdom on Western societies. 'The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later,' she writes. This was, significantly, a period during which the church had become 'politically secure,' thanks to Constantine. Yet, instead of providing a truthful account of Christianity’s early years, the scholars and clerics of the fourth century cranked out tales of horrific, systemic violence. These stories were subtly (and not so subtly) used as propaganda against heretical ideas or sects. They also made appealingly gruesome entertainment for believers who were, personally, fairly safe; Moss likens this to contemporary suburbanites reveling in a horror film."

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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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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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