There are many reasons AI should never replace flesh-and-blood audiobook readers, and here are three of the most persuasive.

If you thought Ann Patchett couldn’t top having Tom Hanks read the audiobook for The Dutch House, here is the great Meryl Streep to narrate Patchett’s latest novel,  Tom Lake (HarperAudio, 11 hours and 22 minutes). Tom Lake contains a story within a story: When her grown daughters return to the family cherry orchard in northern Michigan to ride out the pandemic, Lara Nelson gives in to their begging and recounts the tale of her youthful romance with Peter Duke, a movie star she knew before he became famous. Two timelines unfold, one set in the past, when Lara played Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and the other in the uncertain present.

Oscar-winner Streep uses her talents to add significant depth and richness to a deceptively simple story about love, marriage, and how we stumble unwittingly into our lives. She uses small differences in tone between the young, inexperienced Lara and the mother in her late 50s who is secretly guilty about the joy she feels at having her girls home again, even in terrible circumstances. This warm narration underscores Patchett’s poignant elegy for the slippery chaos of youth as well as her gentle reminder that we should dare to seek happiness even in dark times.

If you read the print version of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, listening to its sequel, Crook Manifesto (Random House Audio, 10 hours and 47 minutes), will make you wish you had listened instead. Reader Dion Graham is a lively, knowing presence as he narrates Whitehead’s rollicking story of 1970s Harlem, where crooks and scammers, hard cases and Black militants, dirty cops and crafty politicians come crashing together as the city’s troubles ignite like a Molotov cocktail.

Graham’s deep voice carries much gravitas, and he’s terrific at delivering lines like “Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight.” That phrase paints a deft picture of Ray Carney, furniture salesman and occasional jewelry fence who finds himself on the wrong side of the law again when he tries to score Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter. As the decade rolls on, Carney’s sometime employee Pepper, no stranger to criminal activity, searches for the missing star of a Blaxploitation film being shot at Carney’s store, while the Bicentennial approaches and rampant arson rapidly changes the shape of the city.

Crook Manifesto is an engaging and funny book, a history lesson with a wry sense of irony, and Graham is the perfect mouthpiece for Whitehead’s chatty wisdom.

Robin Miles, the narrator of Dennis Lehane’s searing Small Mercies (HarperAudio, 10 hours and 23 minutes), excels at revealing the conflicted soul of Mary Pat Fennessy, the increasingly desperate mother whose teenage daughter has gone missing on the eve of Boston school desegregation in 1974.

Mary Pat is tough, born and raised in South Boston, and Miles nails her accent (she also voices the book’s other main character, the detective investigating the girl’s disappearance). But just as there are fascinating depths to this crime novel, there’s more to Mary Pat than her ferocious, vengeful outer shell. She’s a hard woman to like, but Miles’ interpretation enhances Lehane’s intense, insightful window into the source of ingrained racism.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.