📚 GoodReads link.
🎧 Available on Audible.
(But not recommended in audio format...! Read below)
A book by Bhikku Bodhi.
A good entry point for those ready to tackle the The Pali Canon.
In the Buddha's Words is an anthology of the Buddha's works that has been specifically compiled by a celebrated scholar and translator. ... Each section comes with introductions, notes, and essays to help beginners and experts alike draw greater meaning from the Buddha's words. ... This thoughtful compilation is a valuable resource for both teachers and those who want to read the Buddha on their own.
(Per the above GoodReads link).
This is grouped in [WIP] Stage 3 Resources (What's with the '3 Stages'?).
The Pali Canon is as original as Buddhist source material gets, and as close as you can hope to get in terms of direct knowledge transfer from The Buddha himself.
This book, In the Words of The Buddha, ****is a mixture of commentary and faithful translations of select suttas from the canon, and as such is rife with the trappings that come with the oral tradition in which the original source material was preserved in for the hundreds of years before first being transcribed. In other words, there's still a lot of repetition. What's more - the language still 'tastes' ancient, and so you should expect this to require more attention to parse, and that you'll ultimately be reading at a slower speed. It's also probably unnecessarily ambitious to expect to be able read this book cover-to-cover or for long session lengths like you might with other books. It's for this same reason that I'd recommend the paper back over the audiobook (available on Audible).
While the whole Pali Canon is perhaps a lifetime-reading project, it's absolutely worth diligently trying to establish some kind of knowledge/understanding relationship with the canonical material at some point; this book is a great place to start probing that relationship.