Humphrey Stone

Snapshots of the city

Six CDs, 75 minutes each
www.csaword.co.uk

Lying stock-still with a bandage over your eyes for several weeks has its bonuses. In the bookshelves downstairs sit all those spines that for years have been gazing at you reproachfully, pleading ‘when are you going to take me down and read me?’ Help is at hand. You don’t have to exhaust the eyes staring at their type. You can be read to. Ever since my father would read aloud, usually Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, every evening in winter to anyone who wanted to listen, I have loved being read to. So what better thing to do than to plug into talking-book cassettes (which must be unabridged)? I started with Proust, appropriately, because lying there in bed it was as if I were the author himself, immersed in his world. It was read by someone apparently capable of taking enough breath for a two-page-long sentence. I ended with The Leopard, enthralled, and have been listening to, rather than reading, books ever since.

But what about the actors who read them? Some of the pronunciations are irritatingly contemporary. We have recently been hearing on Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 ‘Bathsheba’ and ‘primarily’ with the accent on the second syllable. On the other hand, Martin Jarvis is so brilliant reading the Just William stories, introduced to me by my grandsons who love listening to them in the car, that he has become as inseparable from the books as Shephard’s drawings are from Winnie-the-Pooh.

Dubliners is the latest classic to come out on CD. I find CDs more fiddly than cassettes, but the sound is infinitely superior. The Irish actor T. P. McKenna has the perfect voice to conjure up turn- of-20th-century Dublin life. You can smell the place.

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