Babylon By Bus is read aloud by Jeremy Davidson.

Babylon by Bus, by Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann with Donovan Webster, read by Jeremy Davidson. Unabridged, 8 hours. Penguin Audio, $39.95.

Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann had a thriving business selling bootleg “Yankees suck” T-shirts outside Fenway Park, but they also had an itch for adventure. When the 2003 baseball season ended, they didn’t just want to travel to some Asian beach and lie there, or backpack around Europe one more time.

Instead, they went to Baghdad. And, walking in from nowhere, with nothing to recommend them but their presence on the scene and their willingness to work, they found themselves coordinating American aid to Iraqi non-governmental organizations (what we’d call non-profits; in government lingo, NGOs).

Fueled by drugs easily available in wide-open Baghdad — Lemoine’s cocktail of choice was liquid Valium with a variety of alcoholic enhancements — they spent a lot of time partying with journalists, filmmakers, international do-gooders and American service members. But they also put in a great deal of time and effort trying to rebuild Iraqi civil society.

Lemoine and Neumann started out pretty naïve for such a streetwise pair – a brief stopover in Israel on the way to Iraq finds them paying lip service to the notion that atrocities have been committed on both sides of the conflict there, but clearly putting the responsibility all on the Israelis. But once in Baghdad, they quickly learned to see nuances, to separate the Americans trying to help the Iraqis from those who seemed merely there to create and enforce often-nonsensical rules.

Highest on the list of rule-makers was L. Paul Bremer, the administrator whom President Bush had appointed to run the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the country between the end of the war and the institution of Iraq’s elected government. Bremer, Lemoine and Neumann say, wrote 100 rules by which Iraqis had to live, and many of them made things worse instead of better.

The worst, Lemoine and Neumann say, was the rule that any Iraqi who wanted to run a non-profit had to be included in a public registry that would give their name and address. While it sounded in theory like a prescription for openness, in practice it marked any Iraqi involved as a collaborator, and marked him or her for assassination.

As the story continues through mid-2004, things do improve in Iraq for a while, as Lemoine and Neumann fight through their drug-and-alcohol haze to work with other dedicated folks who were really trying to make a differerence. But ultimately, Baghdad spins out of control, and Lemoine and Neumann abruptly lose their place in the Authority when they have a fistfight with a shop owner while getting some R&R in Lebanon. They return to America and watch from afar as things continue to decline.

Lemoine and Neumann’s story is somewhat self-serving, but their on-the-scene descriptions of life in Baghdad, both inside and outside the “Green Zone” the Americans established as a secure section of the city, are strong and compelling. Davidson reads in an engaging way that helps make the book a good listen.

The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass, read by Denis O’Hare. Abridged, 9 hours. Random House Audio, $34.95.

Invent a wife (in this case, a New York City chef ) and a husband (here a New York shrink). Add a new job and a pair of old flames. Stir. Toss in the shock of 9/11. Stir again.

That’s the recipe in this by-the-numbers story of romance lost and found, with a gay restaurateur, his ne’er-do-well nephew and a brain-damaged young woman thrown in for extended periods that never do much except distract from the main tale. Which, given its lackluster telling — surprising from Glass, who won the National Book Award for Three Junes — may not be such a bad thing.

The one lively element in all this is the man whose arrival is the impetus for the stirring and mixing . He’s the governor of New Mexico, Ray McCrae, who hires chef Greenie Duquette away from her own restaurant and into a world of ranches, desert, and an unexpected reunion with her high school boyfriend.

Ray is a larger-than-life figure whose booming delivery and high spirits are captured well by Tony winner O’Hare (Take Me Out), who also does well by the rest of the book’s characters. But Ray is on the canvas far too little compared with the rest of Glass’ lackluster crew.

Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn, by Sarah Miller, read by Cassandra Campbell. Abridged, 5 hours. Random House Audio, $19.95.

Gideon Rayburn is a teen transferring to a tony Massachusetts prep school from Virginia. He’s left behind his girlfriend of seven months, to whom he almost lost his virginity just before his departure, but she’s given him a parting gift: her yellow thong underwear. As soon as he gets in his room, Gid meets his pot-smoking, rich, sexually charged roommates, Cullen and Nicholas, who quickly issue a challenge: If he can have sex by end of October, with a girl they’ve chosen, he’ll get a car.

The twist is that somehow — never explained — a girl on campus has the ability to hear Gid’s thoughts. But she’s anonymous, and we’re supposed to try to guess which of the book’s characters she might be.

There might be a clever story lurking in the full-length version of this book, pared away in this abridgement to just the sex-and-drug basics. But whether or not there is, what’s left here is a juvenile novel in the worst sense of the term, even though it’s issued not on Random House’s kids’ imprint, Listening Library, but on its adult label.

Campbell throws in some nice Spanish accents for an alluring teacher and a seductive student, both of whom tempt Gid on his quest. But there’s not much even the best reader can do for such silly material.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s assistant features editor.