Deep Winter Reading: Audiobook Classics to Keep You Warm
Each year when the days get short, I find myself wanting to dive deep into a long, sustaining book. I want a sprawling story to slip inside, a sustaining refuge until warmer weather comes. Often, too, I want the book to be read to me, as though I’m a child at bedtime for the length of the cold season. I love audiobooks all year round (they’re great for gardening!), but never more than in winter when the expert voice in my ears both comforts me and transports me elsewhere.
Recently a friend and I were comparing classics we’ve never read. When she wondered aloud if she would ever get around to War and Peace, I was transported back to the month I spent listening to the Tolstoy classic, feeling as though I was living inside those Moscow drawing rooms and snowy battlefields and Masonic halls. Another friend once told me how she had listened to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina when walking her dog in the nearby woods. For her that winter, the woods became Russia. Forever afterwards, when she walked there, she would feel as though she was entering Russia again.
Some writers are hard for some people to read on the page, usually because their sentences and paragraphs are so long that the reader loses her way. When I used to have students who would tell me they had trouble with Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s beautiful novel about a woman wandering around London in 1923, I would advise them to try the audiobook. Just let the language wash over you, I advised them. Don’t worry about every detail. Sometimes that’s the best way to let a book in. The version linked to above is read by the transcendent Juliet Stevenson, a narrator about whom an actor friend once said she would listen to her read the phone book. Stevenson’s rendition of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady is stunning.
My two favorite audiobooks of all time are on opposite ends of the comforting-disquieting continuum. The first is E.B. White reading his children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, which is among the most comforting of life’s experiences. The second is Jeremy Irons reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita–a deeply creepy and exquisitely written novel read by one of the creepiest and most seductive voices of our time.
In the holiday edition of this newsletter, I recommended another personal audio favorite, Dylan Thomas reading his lyrical and nostalgic A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Thomas’s Welsh-inflected poet’s voice is deep and resonant, and his comic timing is delightful. The overall quality of the piece is all more extraordinary given the story I’ve heard about it. Apparently the famously alcoholic Thomas drank too much at lunch on the day of the recording, showed up at the studio having lost his script, and proceeded to recite the whole 40-minute piece from memory in one take.
Only certain authors get to read their books for audio, either because they’re famous enough or because they’re deemed to have good enough voices. The short story writer Lorrie Moore’s collection Bark is wry and sad and delightful. Zadie Smith does all the accents in her latest novel, The Fraud: upper class British, cockney, Jamaican, and Scots among others. And of course celebrities usually read their own books, even if they don’t write them (think Cher and Michelle Obama).
When my kids were little we used to listen to “full-cast recordings” of middle-grade novels like Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede, about a princess who likes to fence and runs off to live with a dragon, and Half-Magic by Edward Eager about four siblings who find a charm that grants them half a wish. These recordings adapt the original text much as a movie version does, and the result can be a vibrant tapestry of voices and other sounds.
Some people don’t like audiobooks. They can’t take in story or information through their ears the way they can through their eyes, or they prefer not to have someone else’s interpretation come between them and the author’s words. But for the rest of us, they can be good company on a long car ride, or when cooking dinner, or when clearing snow and ice from our wintry sidewalks
I know many people listen to audiobooks on Audible, which is part of Amazon. If you’re one of those, I’d like to point you to Libro.fm, a great company that supports independent booksellers. Libro.fm works just like the big dog, except that it shares its profits with local booksellers like Celia Bookshop. You can buy books one at a time or get a monthly subscription. I encourage you to check them out–and choose Celia Bookshop as your store to support!
Photo of snowy little library by Andy Shelter
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