The audiobook I recommend most often is Lincoln in the Bardo read by a full cast of 166 voices. George Saunders' novel is already experimental — it's composed of fragments, each attributed to a different historical or fictional speaker — and the audiobook makes the formal choice audible in a way that the printed page doesn't. You hear a cacophony of voices debating events and experiencing grief, and the cacophony is the argument.

I read the print version first and liked it. I then listened to the audiobook and discovered I'd missed a significant percentage of what the novel was doing. The experience of voice, of specific embodied speech, is part of the novel's meaning in a way I couldn't fully access through silent reading alone.

This is the case where I'd argue the audiobook is not an inferior format but the appropriate one — a version of the text that better realizes the author's design.