Summer is a season when we’re on the move and outdoors. It is also a time of frustration in airports and traffic jams. So all my holiday recommendations are available as downloads for tablets and iPods, either from the publishers or rental sites such as audible.co.uk.
Nothing could be more appropriate for the great outdoors A Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion (Naxos, four CDs, £16.99, £15.29) by the Times writer Simon Barnes. Specially constructed for audio, with examples of the songs of our best-loved twitterers prefacing a salmagundi of curious facts about each bird, it is designed, Barnes says, for those whose hearts lift at the sound of the dawn chorus and a melody from a tree, but who can’t identify the singers because they never get round to opening a field guide. Barnes makes amateur twitching easy, with witty mnemonics to help you remember bird calls.
Equally diverting, especially if you are Italy-bound this summer, is See Delphi and Die (AudioGo, 10 CDs, £19.36, £17.42). This is the 17th of Lindsey Davis’s inventive crime thrillers featuring Marcus Didius Falco (backtrack to the first, The Silver Pigs, if you aren’t already hooked). This time Falco’s patrician wife, Helena, takes a more active part than usual in solving the mysterious death of two women on the Ancient Roman version of a Cook’s tour to Greece. Besides being amused and kept on tenterhooks, the listener unconsciously absorbs many diverting facts about the Roman Empire in the time of Vespasian. The narrator, Christian Rodska, morphs between Falco and Helena with chameleonic bravura, to say nothing of sinister tour operators and oracular old maids.
A welcome spin-off from the excellent remake of the film True Grit has been the release of an unabridged reading of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel True Grit (Whole Story Audio, 6 CDs, £18.38, £16.54). John Wayne’s memorable playing of the part of the redoubtable one-eyed marshall Rooster Cogburn distracted UK audiences from the book itself, which has been long recognised in the US as being as enduring a classic as The Catcher in the Rye. The first-person narrative voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross is performed by the novelist Donna Tartt, a lifelong fan. As well as reading with attack and panache, Tartt dilates on the novel’s merits in an epilogue. Listeners will need no convincing.
Forget that Kindle loaded with literary classics. Headphones are far more comfortable on the beach. Sean Barrett gives the performance of his audio career as the narrator of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (Naxos, 22 CDs, £70, £63; £3.99 on an introductory subscription to audible.co.uk). Dickens is brilliant heard aloud, as he intended his novels to be narrated in instalments. Set during the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in London in the 1780s, Barnaby Rudge has a loveable simpleton hero and three first-rate villains: the smooth and cynical Sir John Chester, the devil-may-care inn servant Hugh, and Ned Dennis, a whimsical hangman. Add the heart-of-oak Gabriel Varden and his flirtatious daughter Dolly, plus a Romeo and Juliet love affair between the Anglican son and the Catholic daughter of sworn enemies, and the mix is rich and unexpected.
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No holiday is really complete without a biography. Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (download only, from audible.co.uk) is by no means perfect: the narrator, Cassandra Harwood, needs some lessons on pronunciation. But the subject matter is fascinating. Chanel’s rags-to-riches story is peppered with glitterati in the worlds of art and film as well as haute couture, and her ineffable style won her a host of lovers (including the 2nd Duke of Westminster). But beware of believing it all. Coco was a congenital liar. “The more you run after her, the more elusive her ghost becomes,” says its author, Justine Picardie, ruefully.
Much more reliable is The Writing Life (British Library, 2 CDs, £16.28, £14.65), a skilfully constructed collection of insights into the writing process taken from the interviews with contemporary authors that the library is systematically putting on record. Sarah O’Reilly, interviewer, editor and presenter, excels in the art of creative contrast; the subjects include Michael Frayn, Hilary Mantel, Penelope Lively, Michael Holroyd, Victoria Glendinning, P. D. James, Ian McEwan, Wendy Cope, Michael Morpurgo, U. A. Fanthorpe and Ian Rankin. The British Library has just released the equally interesting Science Fiction Writers (1 CD, £10.20, £9.18), on which Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing and Kurt Vonnegut Jr discuss their craft.
Finally, a couple of listens that will be enjoyed by parents as much as children. Ted Hughes: Stories for Children (Faber and Faber, 5 CDs, £16.99, £15.29) contains his famous short novel, The Iron Man, and his Creation tales. Arranged in sections for different age-groups, they feature a thoughtful God and a host of recalcitrant creatures. The words are trenchant, powerful and often hilarious.
Eva Ibbotson, who died last October aged 85, had a unique ability to create sympathy for her characters. Prunella Scales has the listener chuckling straight away with her sensibly down-to-earth treatment of Ibbotson’s enchanting Not Just A Witch (AudioGo, 3 CDs, £12.50, £10.98). Two witches at a school for good witches quarrel over a magic hat and part company, only to miss each desperately. Love reunites them, but not at all in the way they expect. Skilfully plotted, the story offers splendid jokes and much wisdom.
Retro read
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The author’s entrancing first novel for adults took the world by storm with its insights into the mind of an autistic 15-year-old who finds a murdered dog, and braves an alarmingly illogical world to discover the truth about its death — and about his parents. Ben Tibber, who was 14 when he narrated this version, brings out the story’s pathos and humour. Random House, 6 CDs, £17.35, £15.62
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