We've spent a lot of time in the car the past couple of weeks with driving to Grafton Notch State Park twice and Oxford County. But the drives haven't been a hardship with the audio book titles we've been listening to.

Our first car ride to Grafton Notch was spent listening to "Half Magic" by Edward Eager (the kids gave this book, written in the 1950s, a thumbs up).

A few days later we went back down Route 26 to West Paris to dig for gems. During that car ride we started on a new book series, The Roman Mysteries. We all really enjoyed the first book in the series, "The Thieves of Ostia" and the kids were at the library the next day to pick up the next two audio books in the series!

The series is historical fiction set in ancient Rome around 79 A.D. The story is packed full of history about how people lived during that time with details about food, housing and activities. This isn't a time period that the girls have been really interested in up until now. But these books have great characters and the story is fast-paced with lots of suspense and it is right up their alley (and Fino and I are really enjoying the story too).

It's called 'mystery' but my kids say it seems more like an adventure series to them than a mystery. Whatever the case, they are hooked on the series and we are now already on our third audio installment.

After a quick search on the web looking for the author's website to find out how many books are in the series (15 so far with a plan for 17 total), the kids and I discovered that the CBBC has a TV mini-series based the books and it looks really good.

The bummer is that the series is just finishing up it's first season in the UK and no DVD/video recordings and/or broadcast plans are in the works for the U.S. just yet.

But of course YouTube has a couple of trailers, a behind-the-scenes on-location piece and clips from an episode. I think you can guess that my kids are more than a little peeved that the TV series isn't in the states yet! But now they are more motivated to read/listen to the rest of the books in the series.

[Note: The first 4 books in the series are available in audio, the following 2 are not, then books 7-9 have audio versions but after that there is no more audio. It seems weird to me that they would record the books out of order but there you go. But my kids plan to read the titles we can't get in audio because they are clamoring for more, just as a book series should be ;-) ]

Click on the YouTube watermark in the lower right-hand side to view the videos on YouTube (or go here to see them all). A couple of them in this playlist we made have to be watched directly on the site because the person who posted the videos doesn't allow embed code on other sites.

Have any favorite books series - in audio or print - that you like? Tell us about it.