Audiobooks from BorrowBox
Date Added: 27/01/2022
Are you one of our nearly 500 BorrowBox listeners each month? Or is BorrowBox one of our best kept secrets? The 1600+ titles have all been loaned on average 17 times a year. This corresponds to over 30,000 downloads since the service started soon after the beginning of lockdown, in April 2020.
BorrowBox is our second audiobook service, in addition to Libby, which enables us to offer a more comprehensive selection of titles. If you have a favourite author/series, we recommend you check on both Libby and BorrowBox to get the full range of available titles.
Expanding the collection
We add newly published titles to BorrowBox each month. In addition, this month, we were also able to invest in some older titles, filling some gaps by popular authors and adding some modern classics.
Crime: titles by James Patterson, Lee Child, L.J. Ross, David Baldacci, Lynda La Plante and Ragnar Jónasson, (Hidden Iceland series about detective Hulda). Also local crime authors Amanda Brittany and Peter Laws, who were both guests at Central Bedfordshire Libraries’ Murder in the Library in November. We added some crime golden oldies including the first Agatha Christie Poirot, and her first Miss Marple.
Non-Fiction: The Secret Barrister and Fake Law are tales of the law written anonymously, drawing attention to perceived injustices and failings of the UK legal system.
The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays by the popular Young Adult author John Green, based on his podcast, which look at all sorts of examples of how we impact the world we live in. Listen to John read his pieces and think differently about the song “You’ll never walk alone”, about the qwerty keyboard and about star ratings applied to everything from books, to restaurants to public lavatories.
A Life on our planet: my witness statement and vision for the future by David Attenborough is a rather different take on how we impact our world and his views on what we should do to protect the biodiversity of our natural world.
A BBC radio 4 retrospective on the comedian Victoria Wood, with excerpts from her performances, is titled From Soup to Nuts.
John Cleese’s short (1 hour) guide to creativity is an empowering listen.
Science Fiction: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Ready Player Two; Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash; Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth.
Historical: Jojo Moyes’ Giver of stars (about the horseback librarians in the U.S. in the 1930s); Anatomy of ghosts by Andrew Taylor, a mystery set in Jerusalem College, Cambridge in 1786; Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge series, set in 12th century England.
Dramatisations: Alan Bennett’s Lady in the van; Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; and three Lord Peter Whimsey titles (Dorothy L Sayers).
Young Adult audiobooks
How many Young Adult titles have you listened to? This rhetorical question makes no assumption about your age. Young Adult covers the spread of genres and we have added some popular titles including:
The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak and a lesser-known title by the same author, I am the Messenger. This latter is a subtle didactic story about a young man who is prompted to solve a series of mysteries, help others, and thereby improve his own life, by the anonymous delivery of a playing card with a message. It is a darkly funny and ultimately uplifting thriller.
The Instagram sensation, They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera.
The Court of Thorns and Roses fantasy series by Sarah J Maas, who is currently publishing a series for adults, Crescent City, of which we also have the first title on BorrowBox, House of Earth and Blood.
The Cousins is another audiobook by Karen McManus, to add to her mystery/thriller titles on BorrowBox and Libby.
Children's audiobooks
One of our most popular and prolific children’s authors on BorrowBox is Liz Pichon, with her Tom Gates series. Now we have added more titles from some other popular series for youngsters to enjoy, including:
Andy Griffiths’ multi-storey treehouse series;
Julia Jarman’s time travelling cat series (she is perhaps best known for the Big Red Bath picture book and theatre adaptation)
M. G. Leonard’s latest in his Adventures on Trains series, due in February, which begins with The Highland Falcon Thief, and was reviewed by Frank Cottrell Boyce as “Like Murder on the Orient Express, but better.”
Harriet Muncaster’s Isadora Moon series, which begins with Isadora Moon goes to School.
Some Goosebumps titles from the incomparable R. L. Stine.
Sign up for BorrowBox
Download the BorrowBox app (from the App Store for Apple devices, or Playstore for Android). You will be prompted to enter:
• Library: Bedford Borough and Central Bedfordshire
• Barcode: your library card number
• Pin: your 4-digit library pin number.
Then you have to accept their terms and conditions and provide an email address (you can opt out of marketing).
Further information is available on our Virtual Library
If you have any problems, or cannot find your library card or pin number, please use our Contact form, to report the issue via the Virtual Library.
If you, or any of your friends and family, are not a library member, you can join here.
Do tell your Central Bedfordshire friends and family about this service and check each month for new titles.