Mark Haddon on the magic of audiobooks: ‘I haven’t read a book properly until I’ve had it read to me’

A confession. Until this class I ’ d never by rights listened to the audiobook versions of my novels. I ’ d dipped in and out, but I ’ vitamin d never immersed myself wholly. It ’ s not that the readers ’ voices fail to match the spokesperson in my head. It ’ south that the voice in my head is not actually a voice at all. I think of it as a voice. It sounds like a voice. then I stand up in public to read a passage I have scanned a hundred times during the writing of the book and realize that I don ’ thymine know how to pronounce Y Mynyddoedd Duon or holoprosencephaly ( I stumbled over both while reading a section of The Red House at the Hay festival ). How can any human actor recreate the flatter self-delusion and selective deafness of the text listen by your inner ear ? This year is the foremost time I ’ ve listened to the audio adaptation of one of my books in its entirety, because Tim McInnerny reads The Porpoise so well that it has become the voice in which I now read the novel to myself. Like all truly commodity actors he understands how fiddling act is needed. His easy, self-deprecating bass never upstages the text. His voice is the position where the history happens and after a while we are aware of the story and nothing else. Does he know precisely how to pronounce the 14th-century English of the quotations from John Gower or is it merely serene assurance ? I neither know nor care.

I would pay good money to listen to Juliet Stevenson read me the terms and conditions of my mobile phone contract

Despite my reservations about listening to readings of my own knead, I am an avid consumer of audiobooks in general and have little time for those who parade their snobbery about the presuppose superiority of the written bible. Some of the best recitation experiences of my life have been listening experiences : Bleak House, read by Teresa Gallagher and Sean Barrett ; Patrick Leigh Fermor ’ s A Time of Gifts, read by Crispin Redman. I stalled halfway through my Penguin Classics version of Moby-Dick, then listened to Frank Muller read it and was absolutely captivated. And honestly I would pay estimable money to listen to Juliet Stevenson read me the terms and conditions of my fluid telephone contract .

Actor Tim McInnerny. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian There are downsides, of path, beyond poor performances and the wrong choice of reviewer. I ’ ve had to do a lot of driving over the by few years and audiobooks have regularly kept me party. But I love to underline passages in the books I ’ megabyte enjoying so that I can return to them late, and there ’ s no way of doing this when the passages are being spoken and your hands are on the wheel. So I memorise idiosyncratic words in the parts I want to underline, download the text from Gutenberg when I return home, use the memorize words to search for the passages, print them out and paste them into a scrapbook. It ’ s borderline brainsick and laughably inefficient.

And, yes, of course, you can find yourself drifting off while listening to an audiobook, but who hasn ’ metric ton found themselves doing something like while reading a paperback of Boswell ’ mho Life of Samuel Johnson ? I am more likely to suffer from the antonym trouble. I had to give up listening to Anton Lesser reading Paradise Lost while driving because I would lose myself in those serpentine, Latinate sentences and come round to find myself in the fast lane of the M40. One advantage audiobooks have over their physical counterparts – rarely mentioned either by fans or detractors – is that the reader doesn ’ thymine speed up or slow down. They force us to devote the lapp measure of time to each page. It is all excessively easy when reading a physical book to separate it unconsciously into crucial and less important sections, to read the latter more quickly, with less attention or to skip them all in all. a retentive as you don ’ thyroxine firm forward, Juliet Stevenson will make you pay equal attention to all sections of the text and there will be sentences of real beauty and penetration in those purportedly less significant sections that you will not have noticed before. I now intentionally listen to audiobooks of novels I love for precisely this argue. indeed I ’ megabyte tempted to say that I merely haven ’ t read a ledger properly until I ’ ve had it read to me . The porpoise by Mark Haddon is published by Chatto & Windus ( £18.99 ). To rate a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. loose UK p & phosphorus over £15, on-line orders only. call orders min p & p of £1.99

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