The Voice - NYTimes.com My audiobook listening takes place during my morning exercise, which means I spend a good seven hours a week listening to books - far more of them, in fact, than I read in print these days. If you'd encountered me on the street recently, you might have seen me trotting along, laughing aloud to David Sedaris's "Barrel Fever" or Tina Fey's "Bossypants," or crying - yes, real tears and grimaces, I have to admit - to the ending of "The Mill on the Floss." My neighbors either don't notice or are too kind to mention my seeming emotional instability. But if somebody's going to spend 10 or 20 hours in my ears, turning me into a local jogging spectacle, I'd better enjoy the experience. That means, of course, picking the right books to listen to. It also means listening to the right reader. Edward Herrmann did a great job with Laura Hillenbrand's "Unbroken," but I don't want to hear his interpretation of "Barrel Fever." Well, maybe a little, but I'm weird. Narration is, not surprisingly, an essential part of the experience. However, apart from Jim Dale, who has employed his hundreds of voices for the phenomenally successful series of Harry Potter novels, audiobook performers are little known outside of the community of devoted listeners. The best readers don't put so much acting into the recording that it interferes with the connection between the author and the listener. "The Mill on the Floss," for example, is too long a companion for histrionics; the reader of the version I listened to, Jill Tanner, has a steady, lightly understated delivery that allowed the passion and tragedy to unfold. Kate Reading, another British actor with a lovely voice, sometimes seems, in long works like "Middlemarch" and the six-volume Codex Alera fantasy series by Jim Butcher, to let slip a hint of weariness, if not outright boredom. Then there's Grover Gardner, a wry narrator with a mellow, ­regular-guy voice whose talents I first encountered in the legal mysteries of David Rosenfelt. He is remarkably companionable and conveys the feeling he's enjoying the book as much as you are, with a smile that is somehow audible. He has recorded hundreds of books in a long career, and I will soon spend a great deal of quality time listening to him read "The Passage of Power," the latest volume in Robert Caro's unending biography of Lyndon Johnson. I would listen to Gardner read the Federal Register. I feel the same way about Robin Sachs, a classically trained British actor. Sachs shines darkly in his reading of the Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo's smart and gritty Harry Hole books. On television, Sachs has had recurring roles as Ethan Rayne in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and as Adam Carrington on "Dynasty: The Reunion." Which isn't bad - a gig's a gig, after all - but it isn't living the Gielgud life either. As a reader, however, Sachs is subtle and sly: he has a way of saying the word "boss" just as the troubled cop Harry probably would, inflected dozens of ways to get across his attitude toward the particular superior he is speaking with, whether grudgingly respectful, nearly affectionate or oozing scorn. His command of expletives is explosive and sublime. By contrast, Thor Knai, the other actor to narrate a Harry Hole mystery ("Nemesis"), is actually Norwegian and his accent is flawless. Yet his delivery lacked Sachs" gravelly weariness and what to me felt like a deep grasp of the characters. Authors who read their own works take a real risk. Few are professional actors, and oddly, they tend to lack the skills to do justice to their own works. But they do offer a connection with the reader, and some provide happy surprises: my colleague Dan Barry recorded the audio version of his 2011 book "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption and Baseball's Longest Game," lending a quiet dignity to a long-ago minor league contest between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings. John Schwartz is a national correspondent for The Times. His new memoir, "Oddly Normal," will be out this fall.