Lists
by Anna Lyndsey, March 2, 2015 10:34 AM
I have always been a reader, but eight years ago, strange circumstances conspired to make me totally book-dependent. I was stuck within four walls, desperate for distraction and a conduit to the world; but I had to live in total darkness, unable to see words on a page.
So, from the small player in the corner of my blacked-out room, electric voices became my companions. I embarked on a wild journey of literary promiscuity, because when my book collector went to the library, I never knew what would come back. To avoid getting books that I had heard before, I made a list, divided alphabetically; updating it on my brief forays out of the black. These forays were necessarily swift — my skin reacted with agonizing, invisible burning, even through clothing, to all kinds and levels of light.
Looking through my list now (the third edition, I think, but even that is dog-eared and scrawled over), I am amazed at what I have consumed: whodunits and bonkbusters, classic fiction and thrillers, chick lit and family sagas and romances. Some of the titles bemuse me, raising no twitch of recognition in my brain. What on earth was that? I wonder. Others connect to a definite memory. Oh yes, I say to myself, that was the one where the mother has an unfortunate penchant for murdering inconvenient men; it looks like her daughter is going to follow in her footsteps, but then she goes to college instead.
And some, I read the title and think: WOW — I remember that one. I remember not just what happened but myself in the act of listening, sitting upright on the bed or cross-legged on the floor in my dark box, ears pricked, enthralled, seeing the scenes unfold as though in a private cinema installed inside my skull.
So here, in no particular order, are my 10 most memorable audio book experiences, listened to in the dark.
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English Passengers
by Matthew Neale
In 1857, a long-suffering Manx sea captain transports an ill-assorted expedition to what is now Tasmania. They are looking for the Garden of Eden; they find the near-extermination of the native people. Narrated by each of the main characters in turn, every one of them with an utterly distinctive voice and vocabulary, and read by different actors, this book illuminated a period of history unknown to me, and though appalling, it is often hilariously funny. It even has a wombat in it. What more could a person want?
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Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Six self-contained stories set in different conflict-riven societies, in the past and in the future; all completely involving, all incarnations of one soul. He should not get away with it, but he does.
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Villette
by Charlotte Bronte
A young woman alone in the world goes to Brussels to be a schoolteacher. Villette contains one of the most compelling descriptions of extended loneliness and its consequence — severe depression, before it had its modern name. Villette also has one of the most understatedly awful endings; I could not believe what I had heard, had to rewind and listen again and then again, before I was convinced. I still rebelled.
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The Greengage Summer
by Rumer Godden
Some children are stuck for the summer in a French hotel when their mother is taken ill. Ignored by most as irritants, they are treated with kindness by someone who turns out to be a criminal, coming up against all the ambivalence and brutality of the adult world.
I had never heard of this book or this author, and on reading the blurb, my expectations were low. But it lodged itself in my mind, meaning, somehow, much more than it said.
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Bravo Two Zero
by Andy McNab
The true story of an SAS patrol trapped behind enemy lines during the first Gulf War, this book ignited my covert love affair with SAS thrillers, a genre I was entirely unfamiliar with in the life before the darkness.
What's so good about SAS thrillers is the amount of practical, how-to information they contain, about all sorts of things. For example, it takes 40 minutes for the human eye to adjust to darkness, so SAS members always keep one eye shut when they turn on a torch at night. I was in a situation where learning new skills was pretty near impossible, and relished these theoretical survival lessons. And I found, strangely, that I did have something in common with these SAS heroes. Before an operation, they prepare meticulously, researching the objective, thinking through different scenarios, checking and rechecking their equipment. Required to avoid hospitalization at any cost, I have learned to place my feet carefully as I descend the stairs, check the chair I stand on for wobbliness, throw out even mildly questionable food. We share this intense consciousness of downside risk.
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Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
A memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1930s and '40s — hunger, poverty, alcoholism, people dropping like flies from TB. It is read brilliantly by the author, who does all the different voices. This book was notorious as the begetter of misery lit — but what no one tells you is that parts are also extremely funny. I lay on my carpet and roared.
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Dracula
by Bram Stoker
I have never been very good with horror as a genre, being prone to giggling at key moments of supernatural manifestation. But Dracula, in the dark, on audio, scared me witless — partly because the story is told through different characters' journals, letters, and reports, which heightens the realism, and partly because of the mesmerizing central personality.
I related to the Count. When I started to get a little better and could venture out for walks before dawn and after dusk, I became acutely aware of the timing of sunrise and sunset. The latter was a moment of liberation, awaited with eager impatience; the former, if I miscalculated the return from my morning walk, a moment of dread.
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Gormenghast
by Mervyn Peake
Peake lovers form a secret clan. Often, in the life before, I'd make a friend and then discover, after weeks or months or years, that we both loved Gormenghast.
My failing as a reader of text was always to go too fast, to skip descriptive passages, to sum up whole pages with a sceptical, summarizing eye. Revisiting Gormenghast on audio, I was forced to ingest every single word, and was even more enraptured by the vast, sprawling castle-world, its vivid denizens, its ancient rituals, and the rise of Steerpike, ambitious, amoral, able, full of murderous vitality.
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The Emperor's Children
by Claire Messud
A group of New Yorkers negotiate friendships, start affairs, pursue creative projects, plan minor revenge. Then 9/11 happens. All the working-out of plot the reader has been conditioned to expect is disrupted; lives sheer off in radically altered directions. I absolutely did not see it coming — which is, of course, the point. We only partly write the novels of our lives; other forces regularly grab the pen. This book underlines the brute contingency of our different fates.
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
by Jean-Dominique Bauby
In his early 40s, a journalist, the editor of Elle in Paris, has a massive stroke. When he regains consciousness, he finds he has "locked-in syndrome," unable to move any part of his body. But his mind is alert and clear.
He discovers that he can move one of his eyelids slightly. By blinking at the appropriate letter as another person reads off the alphabet, he finds he can, with the help of an amanuensis, compose remarks, requests, and finally the text of this book.
Despite massive physical obstacles, Bauby sends back elegant, ironical, informative dispatches from an extreme frontier of human experience. I had already begun, out of desperate boredom, to write in the dark, but had only produced fragments. This book galvanized me. I took my large bound notebook, and I started to persist.
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