Audiobooks

I don't really have a point of view on the  increased popularity and prevalence of audiobooks. So much depends on individual tastes and circumstances, and on what sort of "book" one is talking about. In the case of fiction, a book will stand not only on the quality of the writer but also of the narrator - or rather on the reader's interaction with the narrator. 

I thought Penelope Wilton's reading of All Change, the concluding volume of Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Cazalet Chronicles, was quite understanding. I was equally taken by Will Patton, the narrator of Stephen King's The Outsider. On the other hand, the plummy accents of Stephen Fry in the Sherlock Holmes stories, just did not work for me.

On the strength of my very limited experience, I think I will always prefer the printed as opposed to the spoken word. What, after all, is the audiobook but a technically sophisticated version of the books that our parents read to us as children, or that Charles Dickens read to captivated audiences in England and America? To this day, I can remember the extraordinary power of the bedside stories, that my mother used to read to me. Nothing I have read since then can match the world she conjured up in long-forgotten books like Sam And The Others or Alfie.