These we Have Loved – Audiobook recommendations

We felt we couldn’t close our Audiobook Month – Talking Books – without a few recommendations – both for those   who already enjoy audiobooks and for those who still don’t quite ‘get’ them.   Some are from the Book Foxes themselves others are from those of our guests we could persuade to stand still long enough for reasoned thought (if our guests had a common denominator, it was how insanely busy they all were …).

Reading through the recommendations, it becomes very obvious that when we have our next Audiobook event (for have another we assuredly will), there’s someone we really need to try and talk to – Anton Lesser:

Nicolas Soames, Managing Director of Naxos Audiobooks:

Top of the list must be the 1954 recording of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. This is, to my mind, the most original work on audiobook (or radio as it was!), full of the most delightful poetry humour and pathos. And the performance is simply unmatched – the outstanding cast headed by Richard Burton created a remarkable vivid image of the town of Llareggub and its people. Burton recorded it twice, but the original of 1954 has all the magic.

My top choice from Naxos AudioBooks – a rather difficult decision – would probably be Milton’s Paradise Lost (unabridged) read by Anton Lesser. He caught the spirit and the intensity of the poetry and its topic – an incredibly difficult thing to do, but which he did in a seemingly effortless manner.

Or would it be Anton Lesser’s reading of Tristram Shandy, the greatest and most humane comic novel of all time. It says a lot about Anton that he can perform two such outstanding works of diametrically opposite characters. As Stephen Fry commented: The Great Anton Lesser.

Finally, Humphrey Bower’s unabridged recording of Shantaram by Gregory David Robert is a brilliantly sustained read of a popular novel. If you want to hear popular audiobook performance at its best, with a vast range of actors and characters, list to its 40 hours! I did, walking through the red desert of inner Australia…

Pat Beech, Manager of RNIB’s National Library Service:

Choosing just five books has been hard as I have been an avid reader since I was a child so I have chosen books that mean something to me and that are available in Talking Books.

Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree (read by Evelyn McLean) – a book that helped me to discover the sheer joy that reading can bring.

Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (read by Christopher Oxford) – Agatha Christie was the first adult author that I read and I have chosen this title as it was one of the first books that RNIB added to the Talking Book library – over 75 years ago.

Bernard Schlink’s The Reader (read by Peter Wickham) – I read this before the film (I still have not seen it). It is difficult to explain why I have chosen it without giving away the plot so all I will say is that it sums up why I am passionate about all children experiencing the joy of reading so that they become confident readers.

Henning Mankell’s The Faceless Killers (read by Sean Barrett) – my favourite genre is crime and I am always looking for new authors. This book was my introduction to the wonderful stories that have been translated from Swedish over the last 10 years.

And finally, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (read by Charlie Norfolk) – well the title alone is intriguing but it is a delightful story told in a series of letters. I use quotes from this book when I am talking about reading and the difference it can make to people’s lives.

Barnaby Edwards of Textbook Stuff:

Anything by Stephen Fry. I think my favourite of his is The Hippopotamus – it’s a brilliant book, made irresistible by his glorious reading. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

For sheer audio bliss, you can’t beat Bernard Cribbins’s readings of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. I grew up listening to them and they still have the power to move me. I’ve worked with Bernard a couple of times, and when I eventually came clean about my love for these recordings, he seemed genuinely delighted – he considers them one of his career highs.

A non-fiction audio I listen to again and again is the BBC’s impeccable This Sceptred Isle. Anna Massey’s peerless voice coupled with Christopher Lee’s witty script brings history to life in a way I wish I could have experienced at school. It’s inspirational and supremely entertaining.

I recently listened to Cover-to-Cover’s unabridged Bleak House and was utterly blown away by it. Obviously the story is sensational, but Hugh Dickson’s reading and characterization is without equal. I would love him to do a Textbook Stuff release!

And while we’re on the subject of Textbook Stuff and of Dickens, I’d like my final choice to be John Sessions reading Charles Dickens – The Signalman and Other Ghostly Tales. These five short stories contain all that is brilliant about Dickens and all that is remarkable about Sessions. John’s reading of ‘A Confession Found In A Prison In The Time Of Charles II’ is a perfect example of what I set out to achieve with Textbook Stuff: it’s an overlooked masterpiece resurrected on audio for a new generation of listeners. And that’s exactly the sort of thing that I wanted to do.

Hilary: I love the Naxos audiobook of Virgil’s Aeneid. It’s a multi-voice reading, with a spectacularly wonderful cast – Paul Scofield, Toby Stephens and Jill Balcon. I’ve always reckoned that I’d buy Paul Scofield reading the Northampton Telephone Directory, but here he is, reading a classic of world literature, along side two other actors with remarkable instruments of their own. They make a wonderful case for The Aeneid, a piece that I haven’t picked up since Latin ‘O’ Level – their reading makes me completely forget the trials and tribulations of learning Latin through set texts. It is an adventure story full of elemental drama.

Jackie: My favorite audiobook is actually a recording of a radio play of Shaw’s “Man and Superman” that the BBC did a few years ago. It stars Ralph Fiennes, Juliet Stevenson and Dame  Judi Dench in a superb production that is dramatic and full of humor. I especially like the way Ralph Fiennes says “boa constrictor”.
Unfortunately,it’s out of print at the moment, according to Amazon. Hopefully it will be reissued again in the future.

Rosy: My very favourite audiobook of all time is Winnie The Pooh told and sung by Carol Channing. At least, this is what I have been reliably told it was (I had an unmarked tape – presumably from the record) and the only link I can find for it is this: http://www.everlastingshops.com/vinyl-records/51-winnie-the-pooh.html

There are many things people might pooh-pooh (ho-ho) about this recording. I suppose you could argue it’s not so authentic – Channing is American and does not mask this fact. It isn’t all English summer meadowsy or Alan Bennetty. But it is brilliant and I loved it. She characterises all the voices so well and the songs are great. I loved this so much that I could recite the lot, word perfect, American accent and all – poetry and songs included. I can still recite some of it now -”Here comes Edward Bear now, bump bump bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. Sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.” (Having looked it up I believe there is a but in there – but not bad, not bad for a book memorised aged 4.)

I used to be so good at it that my family would get me to do it on walks and to entertain guests – or to distract me if I was in a bad mood (tiddly poms are always good for that. Except I’d always add some extra tiddly poms after the last line because I enjoyed saying “tiddly pom” so much.)

I loved it so much that I had the tape in a special holder and when I was older stuck stickers and transfers all over it and put it in a special hidden box in a special hidden place … which meant that decades later when my sister wanted it for my niece it was, of course, lost.

Moira: I’ve loved so many audiobooks over the years that it’s not easy to select just one or two –  but I’ve finally settled on the three that made the most impact on me.

My first choice is L P Hartley’s The Go-Between read by our very own Edward Petherbridge. The novel has long been one of my favourites – with an opening line that’s seldom been bettered and its extraordinary, sensuous evocation of a young boy’s long, hot summer in Norfolk in 1900.  The story is told by the young boy as a sixty year old man – scarred forever by the events of that summer and as read by Edward is a hauntingly powerful story that genuinely, at times, causes the small hairs on the back of your neck to rise ..

Secondly – you can add me to the Anton Lesser fan club, because his unabridged reading – for Naxos again – of Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities is close to audiobook heaven.  His Sidney Carton will quite simply break your heart.

Finally, I would urge you to seek out Ellis Peter’s Cadfael novels, as read by the incomparable Stephen Thorne. There are other versions out there, but – with all due respect to everyone involved – none of them come close to matching the warmth and humanity of Stephen Thorne’s readings.  He plainly loves the books himself and enjoyed bringing the characters to life – and that shines through in the narration.  I originally listened them on cassettes (which can still be picked up on eBay), but while researching this piece I was delighted to see that they they are now available from Audible.  I may even indulge myself for Christmas.

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