The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Audiobook— narrated by Santino Fontana

Why the audiobook wins

Suzanne Collins wrote a Hunger Games novel with songs in it. Lucy Gray Baird is Covey, a traveling musician, and her ballads run several stanzas at a time on the page, where a lot of readers skim straight past them. Santino Fontana is a stage actor, and in his hands those verses stop being blocks of italic text and start doing what Collins meant them to do: they carry Lucy Gray's whole strategy for staying alive. His Coriolanus Snow is the other reason to listen. The novel lives or dies on whether a teenager's self-justifications sound reasonable while he makes them, and Fontana keeps the reasonable tone right up to the point where you notice what he is actually saying.

If the 2023 film sent you here, you got about two and a half hours of a story that runs more than sixteen in this recording. The difference is the Capitol year: the Academy, the mentorship scheme being invented meeting by meeting, Dr. Gaul's laboratory, and the long District 12 stretch after the arena where the transformation the whole book exists for actually happens.

Sixteen hours and sixteen minutes, one narrator, one Audible credit. Free with an Audible trial, and long enough to cover a week of commutes.