Audio Books
Headphone highlights chosen by Lucy Lethbridge
CDS are fast going the way of cassettes – into oblivion. A talkingbook aficionado could ask for no better present therefore than a subscription to Audible and a techie young relative to help fix them up.
It starts at £7.99 per month and you can get a trial month free. Not much to lose, considering how expensive hard-format audiobooks are (and libraries, too, are increasingly encouraging us to download talking books rather than take them home).
You can take a few risks. I was intrigued by the new Penguin Classics edition of two unknown (by me) novels: Mary and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft, and Matilda by her daughter, Mary Shelley, narrated by Kristin Atherton. 12 hours 4 mins of listening on Audible (if I stay the course) would have set me back £22.74 if I’d forked out for the CD box.
There are hundreds of thousands of titles in the Audible list, with every mainstream book accompanied by a talking version.
Top of the newly-released charts at the time of writing is From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast (6hrs 44 mins) which will be a hoot for Steve Coogan fans. I like the idea too of William Gaminara narrating Trevor Barnes’s book Dead Doubles, about the Portland spy ring (10 hours, 53 mins).
Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers’s charming new novel set in the 1950s, is read by Karen Cass (9 hours 58 mins). The equally charming
Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce is read by Juliet Stevenson (12 hours, 4 mins). Stevenson is the undoubted queen of audio narration, lending her dulcet tones to novels by Austen, Eliot and the Brontës among others.
Michael Wood is a magisterial historian. His reading of his book The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilisation and its People lasts a meaty 23 hours 7 mins. But not as meaty as Jonathan Keeble reading William Feaver’s two-volume biography, The Lives of Lucian Freud (44 hours, 38 mins) or Ben Miles reading the last in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror
and the Light (38 hours, 11 mins). Miles is just as dark and gravelly as Simon Slater, who read the first volumes.
Both make an interesting contrast to Mark Rylance’s Cromwell in the television adaptation, with his sinister, quiet reasonableness.
Do try Laura Cumming, narrating her wonderful memoir On Chapel
Sands (7 hours 41). A real treat is Gabriel Quigley reading Deborah Orr’s enjoyable memoir Motherwell:
A Girlhood (10 hours, 15 mins). For children, there are books that will beautifully cover a long carjourney or two.
I recommend Katherine Rundell’s light-footed and diverting tale,
Rooftoppers, read by Gordon Griffin (6 hours 7 mins).
Older ones will be gripped by the brilliant Andy Serkis (Gollum in the films) reading The Hobbit (10 hours 24 mins). And Julia Donaldson’s new book The Go-away Bird, beautifully read by Noma Dumezweni, lasts a mere 15 minutes. Bliss.