Zeit bites: let stars lull you to sleep with a story
Last night, Richard Armitage lulled me to sleep with his rich tenor. The night before that, I had a chuckle with Stephen Fry, and the night before that I went on an adventure with James McAvoy.
This, chums, is the heady, celebrity-rich life of the audiobook fan.
They may be a little old fashioned and quirky, but audiobooks are making a come back as the funky new way to jam some literature into your already packed life.
Bung one on when you’re giving the bathroom a good scrub, or heading out on your state-mandated stroll around the neighbourhood, and you’ll be transported to one of trillions of worlds outside your bubble – safely.
I get most of my audiobooks from Amazon’s Audible, where I have a monthly subscription. But you can use audiobooks.com, Kobo, and even your local library might have audio downloads.
From there, I download them straight to my phone, and I’m away.
Audible produces low-cost and free content, too, like excellent and journalist deep dive into underground religions, .
But it’s the fiction you’re really after – the escapist stuff.
Fry famously also read the complete collection of Harry Potter novels, but his own riotous memoirs and novels are here, too.
The BBC’s star-studded full-cast dramatisation of Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy featuring
and radio play than a novel.
There’s even a celebrity-rich featuring and
The performances are not always perfect. Journalist bizarrely chose to put on voices, including one spectacularly bad Kiwi accent, to read his dramatic memoir Seriously, that has to be heard to be believed.
But it’s the intimate, soulful solo fiction readings that I love.
Neil Gaiman reading his whimsical retellings of Norse myths and Richard Armitage, a voice ‘‘rich as a plum pudding dotted with raisins’’ as Audible describes it, delivering a Georgette Heyer romance. giving voice to the fiery
pitch perfect the smirk-heavy California drawl of
Westchester is more like a restraint of and the clipped, Manhattan angst of
They’re marvellous, sustained performances you shouldn’t miss if you’re a fan. We’re never too old for a good bedtime story.