An audiobook will never be as good as seeing words on a page

It was while I was being read to that I first realised I could read. As a child I looked forward to the moment before bedtime when I would look at the pictures in a storybook while my father read the words. One day I found that I was ahead of him. I had got to the bottom of the page while he was still intoning the list of things that Phyllis Krasilovsky’s The Very Little Girl was smaller than.

From that moment,

I was launched as an independent reader – a transition as dramatic and liberating as that from crawling to walking.

Being read to as a child is wonderful. In many ways: you are introduced to storytelling – that most beguiling of human survival stratagems – and you experience the deep satisfaction of being safe and warm indoors while Mole and Badger are lost in the snowy Wild Wood.

But how to explain the newfound appetite among adults for listening to stories? Following the success of Radio 4’s 10-hour adaptation of War and Peace, broadcast in its entirety on New Year’s day, 2015 (an experience described by one critic as “like soaking in an everreplenishing warm bath”), it is Proust’s turn to take over the airwaves.

In Search of Lost Time will be broadcast on Radio 4 over the Bank Holiday weekend. “There is an appetite for the epic that has simply surpassed our expectations,” says Celia de Wolff, director of both adaptations.

Later this month, 20 unabridged classics will be available on the BBC Sounds app. Meanwhile Laurence Howell, director of content at Audible UK, detects

“a real boom” in sales of audio books, while those of physical and ebooks remain flat.

Evidently convenience is a factor: what better distraction from some dreary chore than to listen

to a chewy epic at the same time? An audio version of a text offers a way into a book that might otherwise seem inaccessible. And, even as grown-ups, we are susceptible to the childhood comfort of being told a story.

Still, there is something revealing about de Wolff ’s remark that “listeners who follow a book from beginning to end ... will experience the sense of a big read”. In a similar way, I suppose, you might experience the sense of a glass of wine when you sip the non-alcoholic version, or the sense of flying a fighter jet by doing it on a simulator.

To immerse yourself in a warm audio bath of Tolstoy or Proust while you do the washing-up is undoubtedly pleasant, but it is not to be compared with the exhilarating intimacy of reading when it is just you and an author alone together on the page.

The violinist Nicola Benedetti tells Gramophone magazine that she supports diversity in music, but doesn’t feel the fact that great classical composers of the past were mostly white and male lessens the power of their music.

If the search for an equilibrium between musical diversity and the titans of the classical repertoire sometimes feels painfully worthy and adversarial, Jess Gillam’s This Classical Life on Radio 3 is the antidote.

Gillam, a 20-year-old former BBC Young Musician of the Year, and her equally young interviewees, slip effortlessly and knowledgeably between Beethoven and Bowie, ignoring boundaries as though they don’t exist.

Which, of course, they shouldn’t.