A Lovely Read

A Lovely Sunny Friday today in London, always makes it slightly more difficult to sit at a desk from 9-5 though. To help the afternoon slip by I am listening to Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. The featured book is Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance. I read the book a week or so ago and thoroughly enjoyed Whipple's wit, and her concise writing perfectly balanced with small and beautiful details that slowly and subtly build the characters and the setting. It is a lovely edition published by Persephone, and I truly enjoyed the typeface, the good quality paper, and the beautiful cover.

The audio adaptation is far from un-enjoyable, but it lacks the beauty of the words on the page, and even more significantly, it doesn't grasp my attention in the same way as a book. Reading takes a degree of concentration, you must sit in a position so that you can hold the book, must direct your gaze towards the page, and in doing so outside distractions fall away, but when listening too many other things can be accomplished, and this leads the reader astray from the beauty of the words, and sometimes even from the plot. In addition there is the abridgement, that necessarily removes phrases and nuances that I feel are a large part of the strength of Whipple's book, of any good book.

I don't mean to belittle the medium, it brings books in small manageable packages to busy people daily, and a good book- abridged and on audio or not, is a wonderful thing. Rather I realise just how precious the written word can be, and how much beauty there can be in a new book, an old well-read and slightly crumpled book, a paperback, a hardback, a long-awaited book, and all those ones that crop up seemingly out of nowhere - often the best of all.