CHRISTINA HARDYMENT won't love me for this, but I've virtually never bought an audiobook. I'm not sure why, but, as with my ambivalent attitude towards books in translation, it's bound to be something to do with me being such a literary control freak. Let's see.

Yes: most audiobooks are abridged. I don't like that: I don't want someone else telling me which parts of Atonement I need not bother with. Most audiobooks, moreover, are read by actors, who are being directed in the recording studio, so, obviously, that also grates: I don't want someone else telling me how to read those bits of Atonement they think I should bother with, either.

Reading is a strangely intimate act; it's part of that intimacy that you hear the author's words inside your head, rendered in your own version of his or her voice. Once those words exist outside your head, in your car or headphones, this intimacy is lost. Before anyone sharpens their pencils for complaint, I know that literature was originally an oral tradition, that if what I'm saying was true, there would be no audience for authored readings (which I've often performed myself) and that I will of course retract all these remarks should I go blind.

Anyway, last weekend I bought one: David Sedaris reading his 2004 collection of stories, Dress Your Family in Corduroy And Denim.

Again, I don't know why I made an exception in this case - although that it was discounted may form a small part of the why - but having worked out my list of audio book cons, I think I can see the pros of this one. First, it's unabridged: a no-brainer. Secondly, it's read by the author - so it is his voice I'm hearing inside my head.

Thirdly, Sedaris is something of a spoken word player, having been discovered on the radio, so, unlike some authors, he's liable to possess some performing chops. Lastly, his work is entirely autobiographical: so I know there's not going to be a clash with any of my own sonic expectations - like buying, say, a CD of Lady Chatterley's Lover read by Ian McKellen and thinking “But I never thought Mellors would sound anything like that!”

Except, when I put it into my car CD player - and I appreciate that the column this week has been a trifle curmudgeonly, with a lot of “I don't likes”; blame the bad Bank Holiday weather - I didn't like Sedaris's voice. It sounded, on first hearing, nasally, a touch whiny, and a bit like his tongue might be slightly too big for his mouth, in the manner of Jamie Oliver and the girl who was the lead singer of The St Winifred's School Choir. It also sounded, to me, too gay. I'm not using gay here in the modern, Chris Moyles/seven-year-old schoolboy way, to mean rubbish.

Nor am I being homophobic. What I mean is that that Sedaris's gayness, an integral part of his personality within the stories, even those not about his sexuality, is foregrounded and emphasised in his voice in a way that it isn't in the prose, and that which, on first hearing, can seem unsubtle.

However, I had a long journey ahead - I was on my way to Chelsea v Arsenal from the backwaters of Kent - so I stuck with it. And then an interesting thing happened. As I grew to like the writing, I grew to like the voice. Gradually, I began to hear in Sedaris's voice the note of pain held in check by the lilt of wit that makes it the perfect instrument on which to play out his narratives of self-deprecation and domestic despair.

Perhaps this is all to do with familiarity. When I was a child, I remember, my dad had a very old, warped, scratchy copy of Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas in Wales, which included, on the B-Side, his versions of Fern Hill and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Thomas considered himself something of an old ham as a reader, and certainly, when I was young, I was much put off his poetry - even frightened of it - by his ridiculously melodramatic sonority. And yet now, when I think of the lines “But I sang in my chains like the sea” or “And you my father/There on that sad height” the voice that enunciates them in my head is Thomas's: and to the adult me, maybe because they mean more now than they did then, it is the right voice - what seemed then like hamminess now seems simply emotion.

So I take it all back: I do like audio books - if they're unabridged, if they're read by the author and if I've got loads of time (in Dylan Thomas's case my entire life) to get used to the author's voice should I find it initially alienating. Clearly, I was quite wrong about that control freak thing.

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