I wrote the other day about one inconvenience: if your attention should happen to wander for a moment, you "lose your place" in the book. Worse than that, suppose you should drop off to sleep, as I have once or twice even when reading such a beautiful book as Elizabeth Jane Howard's All Change? It is at times like these that I realise that my personal reader, Penelope Wilton, so altruistic and selfless in Downton Abbey, is in fact not as personal as all that, as she ploughs on relentlessly long after I have nodded off, and I have the devil's own job trying to find my place again.
Seriously, and contrary to what I wrote last time, Penelope Wilton is quite brilliant. Reading aloud is quite an art and I suspect that you have to be something of an actor to carry it off successfully. My mother was wonderful at it and I can still remember her reading a book called Sam and the Others to me. I recall nothing of the book itself now but everything of the wonderful feeling of being tucked up snugly in bed, all "fubsy" and warm with my "fellows" (a worn-out rabbit with one ear missing and a threadbare dog), as Mose told me the story.
As for All Change itself, I have still got about an hour to go, in audiobook terms, but I think it is a masterpiece.
Seriously, and contrary to what I wrote last time, Penelope Wilton is quite brilliant. Reading aloud is quite an art and I suspect that you have to be something of an actor to carry it off successfully. My mother was wonderful at it and I can still remember her reading a book called Sam and the Others to me. I recall nothing of the book itself now but everything of the wonderful feeling of being tucked up snugly in bed, all "fubsy" and warm with my "fellows" (a worn-out rabbit with one ear missing and a threadbare dog), as Mose told me the story.
As for All Change itself, I have still got about an hour to go, in audiobook terms, but I think it is a masterpiece.
No comments:
Post a Comment