Your Advice Solicited!

For my upcoming audio book workshop/demo recording session, I need to come up with four one-minute excerpts to read. The idea is to demonstrate my skills and the kind of works that would be excellent given my reading style and vocal qualities. I'm sitting here with a stack of books, trying to figure out which ones might be best, and I thought I'd enlist your aid in the matter.

If anyone has any ideas of a book that you'd enjoy hearing read in my dulcet tones, I'm all ears to hear about it. (If you haven't heard my dulcet tones for a while, you can give a listen to my wee commercial demo here. [Man, but it's weird to hear that again after many months of pretending it doesn't exist.]) Below is a list of the kinds of works that are most popular in audio format these days:

1. Mystery and Suspense


2. Fiction (New Fiction, Best Seller, Science Fiction)


3. Classic (Fiction or Fact)


4. Nonfiction (Fact, History, Science, Biography, Memoirs, Political)


5. Humor, Poetry and Drama


6. Young Adult (Contemporary, Children's Collections)


7. Instructional (Philosophy, Education, Business, Management)


8. Personal Growth (Self Help, Health, Diet, Exercise, Spiritual, Motivational)

A few other guidelines:

• It doesn't have to be a work no one's recorded before.


• While any work is open, I should probably stick to American works (as the word is that there are plenty of real Brits lined up to record British fiction).


• If you have any suggestions for particular events or passages of the novel that really strike you as being fantastic, that would be excellent to know.


• I'm supposed to find one work with first-person narration, one with third-person, and the third is open (but might be a useful slot for non-fiction).


• If I've read the book, that's a large bonus. (Or, alternatively, if it is a work I could read in the next week or so, that might be manageable as well.)


• If it falls within my purview of specialty (like a non-fiction work about literature, writing, or Christian apologetics, or historical, rural, humor, fantasy, or science fiction on the fiction side), this is also a bonus. On the other hand, I'm probably not going to rock at urban fiction or medical texts, for example.

I will certainly have this together by next weekend in any case, but any clever ideas you people have would be most appreciated, especially because my ability to tell what kind of work would suit my voice is often lacking. I thank you in advance.