David Sedaris is the author of When You Are Engulfed In Flames.

AP / ANNE FISHBEIN

When You Are Engulfed In Flames, by David Sedaris, read by Sedaris. Unabridged, 9 hours. Hachette Audio, $34.98.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames: now, that’s a title guaranteed to get your attention. But an oddball name is the smallest reason to listen to this excellent collection of Sedaris’ monologues, the sixth book to chronicle the absurd humor he finds in life.

Instead, listen for Sedaris’ wonderfully quirky take on just about everything, from living with a human skeleton to the glories of his pet spider to the humiliation of sitting partly clothed in a doctor’s office while others are in full dress, the victim of a misunderstanding.

The master work of the collection is a story, lasting for the final quarter of the book, about Sedaris’ attempt to quit smoking. He and his boyfriend, Hugh, move to Tokyo for three months on the theory that a change of scenery will make the effort easier, and Sedaris — who lives with Hugh in Normandy, and struggled with the French language in Me Talk Pretty One Day — finds that learning French was a snap compared with learning Japanese. (The book’s title comes from some strange attempts at English translation by Japanese writers.)

But that’s only one small part of the winding tale of Sedaris and cigarettes, and its ins and outs help make this book one of his best.

Sedaris is at his best reading to an audience and playing off its laughter. Four of these stories were recorded live. But in concert hall or recording studio, his timing and deadpan delivery help make the whole book a treat.

Harvesting the Heart, by Jodi Picoult, read by Cassandra Campbell. Unabridged, 17½ hours. Penguin Audio, $39.95.

I’d heard a lot about best-selling writer Jodi Picoult — she set one of her novels, My Sister’s Keeper, in Rhode Island and had technical assistance on others from Rhode Islanders she knows — but had never read any of her books. So even though Picoult wrote Harvesting the Heart a decade and a half ago, I thought I’d check out this new audio version.

And after a slow start, her story of an abandoned daughter and the heart surgeon she grows up to marry proved a rewarding choice.

Paige O’Toole is the daughter whose mother left her at age 5 and disappeared into parts unknown. When Paige turns 18, she does a vanishing act of her own, leaving behind her impractical inventor father and her plans to study art at the Rhode Island School of Design, and getting a job as a waitress a thousand miles from her Chicago home.

It’s in the Cambridge, Mass., diner where she’s working that she meets Nicholas Prescott, a son of wealth and a brilliant surgical resident at Mass. General. Their marriage is as inevitable as it is unlikely, but Paige finds motherhood overwhelming and hits the road again, leaving behind a three-month-old boy and a husband whose rage is equaled only by his hurt.

That the story starts with Paige having returned, camping on the lawn of her former home and begging for Nicholas’ forgiveness, helps explain its difficult beginning. Picoult works backward and forward in time from there, throwing in two points of view, one a first-person telling by Paige and the other a third-person rendering of Nicholas’ story. No wonder it takes a while to sort out what’s going on, and whether we’re going to care. But Picoult has a fine sense of difficult places in the heart, and that’s what ultimately carries this story.

Campbell, the reader, is a theater actress and winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards for her audio-book narration. She creates a Paige whose many moods are well-reflected in the reader’s voice, even if there’s not much differentiation in the rest of the book’s characters.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s South County regional editor.