Hearing Books.

It happens about this time every year (and probably once or twice more as the seasons change): I sicken of music, whether new — after the first fine, careless rapture of gorging on year-end best-of lists — or old, and I turn instead to a calmer, more soothing medium: the audiobook. I’m in the middle of an orgy of book-listening that may or may not abate soon, although writing about something is usually a good way to kill my passion for it.

I work at a job where I can listen to my mp3 player all day. And I do. Over the past few weeks or so, I’ve listened to C. S. Lewis’s Christo-psychological fantasy-thriller That Hideous Strength — still my favorite of his novels, though its flaws are clearer on every pass; it’s all muddled up with my happy adolescence — Angela Thirkell’s restful provincial-wartime comedy of manners Cheerfulness Breaks In, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles (which are both better and worse than I remember them from childhood), J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (which is very much better), several unsatisfactory BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Peter Wimsey novels, the undying golden charm of The Wind in the Willows, Lian Hearn’s first novel in the Tales of the Otori series (staggeringly beautiful, and it makes me want to tackle The Tale of Genji again, this time for real), and the stray P. G. Wodehouse story or so. If I still had my Jane Austen audiobooks I’d probably break into them, but I’m in the middle of the next best thing (for a slightly maudlin Englishwoman of a certain age), which is Dodie Smith’s I Conquer the Castle. Something about the wistful, elegaic mood of Britain on the cusp of losing her empire has been seeping slowly into my bones; and tears actually sprang to my eyes simply because Thirkell used the adjective “Edwardian” in the last chapters of Cheerfulness.

Edwardian, whatever it may mean to anyone else, means primarily E. M. Forster to me. Forster is one of my very favorite novelists, from the summery height of the period when to be a novelist still meant something distinct from any other kind of writing, after the Dickensian fat had been trimmed but before Joycean gamesmanship had begun to take over. He could uncharitably be described as Henry James for Dummies, but the meticulousness of his prose, along with the keenness of his vision — and the (perhaps misguided) depth of his sympathy — is like balm to this wounded modern soul. Oddly enough, I’ve only ever read one book of his (A Room with a View), and that only once. All the rest of my encounters with his novels have been via audiobook. Which is of course an imperfect medium (Jenny Agutter’s wild stabs at two separate American accents — for male characters, which is worse — in I Capture the Castle have been causing me to writhe at my desk in agony), but some prose can only be properly appreciated when spoken aloud, as a bird’s beauty is only given shape in flight. Howards End, which has been one of my favorite novels ever since I saw the Merchant-Ivory adaptation as a teenager (Helena Bonham Carter shall ever hold a place in my heart as the first Internet search I ever keyed), I only know as a novel through the medium of Edward Petherbridge’s voice. Which may as well be Forster’s, it fits so well.

Of course audiobooks have some dispiriting qualities: you can’t simply flip through them as you can with a book, looking for a good passage; you can’t share them with others in quite the same way, quoting passages or simply handing it over and saying, “read this!”; you can’t — or at any rate I can’t — just sit and listen to them without doing anything else, which is why listening to them at work is so wonderful. In fact, my productivity has been up since I gave off listening to music in the past week or so.

I’ll start up again soon, I’m sure, once all the calm, wise mellifluousness has driven me batty; but I still have some Anthony Trollope, Mervyn Peake, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to plow through; and I’ve been contemplating digging into Patrick O’Brian, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and even (may my snobbish twenty-year-old self forgive me) Diana Gabaldon, in this relatively painless way. Listening to an audiobook doesn’t generally commit me to liking the writer, since I don’t generally buy them. (No, you monster of suspicion, I use the local library.) On the other hand, frustration with a needlessly discursive plot can easily set in, because I certainly read faster than any narrator can talk. Of the making of many books there is no end, and listening to them can sometimes seem even more interminable.