Audiobooks are the perfect companions on holidays. Whether in your car stereo,
portable CD or MP3 player (all the titles below are available as downloads),
they help young, middle-aged and old alike to escape more deeply into the
imagination of writers than you can by merely reading their books. Even if
you have already read Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from my Father:
A Story of Race and Inheritance (Orion, 4 CDs, £18.99; Buy
the book), it is worth hearing him read it aloud himself. Written in the
mid-1990s, well before he dreamt of becoming a presidential candidate, it
explains how his childhood (white American mother, black African father)
gave him a global breadth of vision and made him attach so much importance
to holding out his hand over the great divides of politics and religion. It
gives credit to his mentors — some from his own family, others at school,
university and in the legal practice where he found so much satisfaction in
looking out for the underdogs of Illinois. Obama won a Grammy for his
reading.
Keep up with the teen trendsetters with Stephenie Meyer’s cult saga of Bella
Swan and her vampire lover, Edward Cullen,, now as much of a success here as
it has been in the US over the past four years. Her four books, which have a
high moral tone despite their House of Hammer trimmings, are Amazon
bestsellers. The first, Twilight (Hachette, 11 CDs, £29.99; Buy
the book), was summed up aptly by School Library Journal:
“Subtle, succinct, and easy to follow, Twilight will have
readers dying to sink their teeth into it.” Unless you are one of the
converted Twilight does not work particularly well as a film; the
book’s magnetic attraction lies in its detailed descriptions of its
characters’ thinking and the suspense-filled world of a small-town high
school beset by vampires and werewolves. The audiobooks intensify the
thrills — no eye-skipping when you can’t turn the pages fast enough. But be
warned: if you get hooked, you may need to repaint the entire house or start
a patchwork quilt: all are unabridged, adding up to 52 CDs in total. The
narrator, Ilyana Kadushin, has a light, lively, slightly knowing voice,
perfect for Bella, who seems naive and vulnerable but has a feisty side and
secrets of her own.
Never mind the latest trend: old favourites are the best comfort reading for
holidays, and audiobooks give them a new dimension. John Buchan is one of
the greatest and most British of storytellers, and Richard Hannay is the
most dashing of his fast-thinking gentleman adventurers. There are one or
two dated moments in The Three Hostages (Assembled Stories,
unabridged, 10 CDs, £25.99; Buy
the book), but from its first lyrical description of the skies, flowers
and birds of an Oxfordshire spring (“The partridges were paired, the rooks
well on with their nests, and the meadows were full of shimmering grey
flocks of fieldfares on their way north”) to the dawn climax in a Scottish
corrie with the villainous Medina dangling over an abyss, the attention of
the listener is tautly held. Peter Joyce, a master of unabridged narrations,
is well-matched to Buchan’s writing.
For both period feel and satisfying plot, Georgette Heyer is hard to beat. Cotillion
(Naxos, 4 CDs, £16.99; Buy
the book) is her funniest book, a tongue-in-cheek parody of what starts
as a predictable “plucky innocent reforms a rake” tale. The orphaned Kitty
Charing is enamoured of her cousin Jack Westrother, a “devilish handsome
out-and-outer of a Corinthian”, but piqued by his failure to turn up when
her guardian tells his great-nephews that his fortune goes with her hand.
She persuades her dandyish cousin Freddy (a “veritable tulip and a pink of
the ton”) to pretend to be engaged to her so that she can do a London
season. Cue sumptuous dress-shop and drapery scenes, but also sharp social
realities as Kitty discovers that most girls on the marriage market have to
put expediency before love. Excellent and hilarious twists of fortune ensue,
and I defy you to guess the outcome. Clare Wille’s spirited reading makes
you appreciate Heyer’s gift for finding the right colourful phrase for every
occasion.
No one should let a summer pass without revisiting P. G. Wodehouse. Martin
Jarvis so obviously relishes reading Uncle Fred in the Springtime
(CSA Word, £16.63; Buy
the book) that I was chuckling even as Pongo Twistleton descended the
steps of the Drones Club on the opening page, and Wodehouse was describing
spring much less lyrically than Buchan. “It seemed unable to make up its
fat-headed mind whether it was supposed to be that ethereal mildness of
which the poet sings or something suitable for skiers left over from the
winter.” Sit back and enjoy the dotty Duke of Dunstable, a desperate attempt
on the Empress of Blandings, impostors galore, several Mickey Finns and a
happy outcome thanks to the resourceful acumen of the fifth Earl of
Ickenham, aka Uncle Fred.
I’m forever planning to acquaint myself more thoroughly with Shakespeare, and
if you have the same resolution I recommend Naxos’s impressive studio
productions of the plays matched to modern Cambridge University Press texts
and using some of our greatest actors. Paul Scofield stars in King Lear, Ian
McKellen in The Tempest (Buy
the book) and Kenneth Branagh in Richard III (3 CDs each, £19.54; Buy
the book). They are also available as cassettes.
If you are heading for the West Country take Alice Oswald’s Dart
(read by the author, Faber and Faber, 1 CD, £13; Buy
the book) with you. The poem is, like its subject, a single entity, word
pictures that follow the river for 45 miles from source (“a foal of a
river”) to sea. “What I love is one foot in front of the other.
South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge
and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out,” it
begins, then tells of ancient oaks and remote gorges, of walkers and
kayakers, of panners for gold and tin, farmers, china clay miners,
fishermen. As it nears Torquay, municipality takes over, sewerage and
drinking-water plants. And finally Torbay, to an escapist symphony of the
names of the beloved little boats anchored in its estuary.
Travelling with children is transformed by an audiobook that appeals to
parents as well. Roald Dahl narrates what were apparently his Five
Favourite Stories (Harper, 5 CDs, £15.99; Buy
the book). They are Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James
and the Giant Peach, The Magic Finger, The Enormous Crocodile
and Fantastic Mr Fox. Dahl’s voice is lighter and higher than I would
have expected, but wonderfully musical.
Neil Gaiman is another author who crosses generations. The Graveyard Book
(Bloomsbury, 7 CDs, £16.99; Buy
the book) begins, “There was a hand in the darkness and it held a
knife”, and leads into the blood-curdling murder of an entire family —
except for one toddler who happened to wander off to the local graveyard
that night. How its ghosts and beasties take him in, defend him from the
sinister hitman and bring him up, and how he eventually discovers the reason
for the killings and avenges them, makes for a modern classic, a
coming-of-age story that teaches morality, wisdom and good judgment without
slowing up for a minute. Gaiman, who reads his own story with precision, has
the knack of making you root hard for his good characters and cringe from
the baddies; he also writes like an angel, trailing metaphors of blood and
mists that re-echo through the tale.
The most heart-warming book I’ve heard all year is Angela Carter’s acidly
funny Wise Children (CSA Word, 4 CDs, £16.12; Buy
the book), read brilliantly by Eileen Atkins, who brings out all its
bawdy joie de vivre as she immerses herself in the character of Dora Chance,
chronicling the family background of herself and her sister Nora, twin
bastards of the great Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard, and in their
day one of the most popular theatrical turns in the business. They are now
75 but “stuck in the period in which we peaked” (“All women do. We’d feel
mutilated if you made us wipe off our Joan Collins mouths”) and living in a
grubby Brixton house (“can’t be doing with scrub, scrub, wash, wash these
days”). A last-minute invitation to go to their father’s Regent’s Park villa
for his 100th birthday party sets in train one of the longest and most
memorable flashbacks in fiction, followed by a burlesque finale that will
leave you thoroughly fortified with cheerfulness and optimism. “What a joy
it is to dance and sing.” Every line is a delight.
