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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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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 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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If you’re expecting a polemic, you might get a quiet one, but you won’t get much in the way of bombast or grandstanding. Wills is a scholar, and his opposition is rooted in a position firmly inside the church. The book is dedicated to the memory of a priest, Henri de Lubac, S.J., and it begins with a long appreciation of the priests Wills has known and loved in a professional lifetime of reading and writing about religion, which itself began in a Jesuit seminary, where Wills studied for five years in hopes of becoming a priest.

This brief memoiristic opening quickly gives way to a historical account of the rise to prominence and power of the priestly class in the Roman Catholic tradition, which begins with the first generation of a priestless movement that hadn’t yet begun to call itself Christianity, and it is here that the reviewer of the audiobook edition begins to experience a special pleasure. So often the better audiobooks get their traction and build their momentum through their narrative qualities — the urgency of scene-making, the building tension of information that the listener is gaining alongside the speaker, the carefully modulated rising and falling of carefully shaped juxtapositions of events.

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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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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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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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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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So it is with Hunter S. Thompson’s “Screwjack,” a brief, loud, sometimes incoherent miscellany in print, which becomes, in the audio edition, a pleasurable way to fritter away an hour.

The audiobook benefits from a strong performance by Scott Sowers, a prolific narrator notable for his ability to change his delivery, and even the quality of his voice, from book to book. In mainstream novels of sensation, such as John Grisham’s “The Confession” or Douglas Preston’s “Impact,” Sowers modulates his cadences up and down to fit the rises and falls of the action, veering from restraint to urgency. In Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel,” his delivery turns stately, to match Wolfe’s elegiac tone.

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The audiobook is ably narrated by Kevin Pierce, whose delivery is clear and true, and whose voice, like Lemer’s, steadily avoids special pleading and melodrama.

“The Last Deployment” begins at the end of the story, after Lemer’s unexpected year-long deployment to Iraq has disrupted his plans to leave the North Dakota National Guard, which he had joined so he could pay for college. Now he is meeting “the only man I’ve ever loved” in a restaurant outside Boston, hoping to rekindle what the war took from them.

But too much has changed, or, rather, Lemer has changed, and his ex-lover hasn’t. In the intervening years, Lemer has lived “the hot summer of 2003, the begging children who swarmed my platoon’s trucks in Baghdad, the scorpions the other soldiers and I caught and released on the Kuwaiti sand, the silly mustaches ...”

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Achebe’s history is rooted in the personal, a choice that begins to seem a moral rather than an aesthetic one as “There Was a Country” proceeds. History, he seems to be saying, is something that happens to human beings, to individuals, to families, to cultures. The fates of empires and great leaders are not insignificant, but the significance of empires and great leaders is rooted not in their power, glory or reach, but rather in the disruptions and occasional blessings they visit upon individuals, families and cultures.

So Achebe, fittingly, doesn’t begin with war. He begins with memoir and family history, in the spirit of the Igbo proverb that says that “a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.”

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To my taste, the greatest of these writers is Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American who has worked in many genres: the novel, the short story, the memoir, the children’s book.

In "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work," Danticat is interested in history, in politics, in culture, in memory, in violence, in risk, in bravery, in reading, in writing, in what it takes to make things true, and most of all in understanding how the circumstances in which things are made can give rise to whatever great power they might achieve.

In mid-career, she has achieved a clear, singular and strong voice that would require something special of an audiobook narrator who wished to do it justice, and, fortunately for listeners, Kristin Kalbli, whose delivery is equally clear, singular and strong, is up to the task.

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It’s a virtuosic half-paragraph, a feat of tonal control that is amplified by the pleasingly plainspoken Texan almost-drawl of audiobook narrator Jennifer Teague, whose delivery radiates the complicated stew of virtues Wisenberg’s prose offers all at once: Sassy intelligence, social conscience, humor, feminist willfulness and indignation at the stream of reductive corporate can-do logic and self-help wall-poster language that patients must endure daily alongside their cancer.

The audiobook begins not with an author note, but with a section titled “About the Bitch,” a name chosen not for the author’s bitchy qualities, but rather because the blog that preceded it “should be called Cancer Something, and Babe was too young and Vixen was already taken.” Then, this news: “No animals were harmed in the production of this book except a few mice, and they were home invaders.”

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It was an appropriate opening salvo for a writer who would become — and who remains — the most consistently interesting and quotable essayist in the English language. At the beginning of her career, Didion announced herself as the owner of two voices: the voice of the throat and the body, which stumbles in service of the other voice, the writer’s voice, the register of the interior life, which has asserted itself ever since with a great and intelligent ferocity.

The writer’s voice, which has been heard for so many years only in the intimate space created by the reader’s imaginative engagement with the words on the page, has now found a richly appropriate vessel in the narration of Diane Keaton. Keaton's delivery is fluid enough to accommodate not only the stately elegance of the sentences belonging to Didion, but also the many emotional colors of the other voices Didion embeds throughout her stories.

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He rose to prominence as a writer of formally daring novels, stories and essays that did their best to interrogate American culture, including the culture of entertainment, while also — in a pleasurably idiosyncratic and sometimes difficult manner — succeeding on their own merits as entertainments.

In his best work — showcased in his hyperbolic literary reportage for Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine, in stories such as “Good Old Neon” and “Adult World,” and in the novel “Infinite Jest,” his masterpiece — he seemed not only to crack open and display the candy-coated sophistication of his own brain, but also to do it in a way that invited a certain kind of reader to imagine that Wallace’s hyper-kinetic, hyper-associative and hyper-insightful page persona was something the reader could share in, because Wallace’s voice was somehow an analogue for the reader’s own interior life. In addition to everything else Wallace’s writing was, it was also, at its core, a virtuoso performance of seduction.

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The opening section tells the story of Kornbluth’s upbringing, as the child of two more-or-less harmless American Communists in New York. Kornbluth’s parents are not likely candidates to inspire a violent revolution. His father is a schoolteacher who is fired from job after job for cursing out the principal. He wakes his son every morning by singing the “Internationale”  –  “Arise ye prisoner of starvation ...” – which Kornbluth interprets as a call to breakfast, a call made less appetizing because Kornbluth’s father refuses to wear anything but talcum powder in the house.

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The Atomic Energy Commission spread the labor among 13 sites across the country. Arguably, the most critical was the secret plant operated by Dow Chemical in Rocky Flats, Colo., which smelted, purified and shaped the plutonium trigger at the core of every American nuclear bomb manufactured between 1952 and 1989. Seventy-thousand triggers, and each one, as Kristen Iversen writes in “Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats,” containing “enough breathable particles of plutonium to kill every person on earth.”

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