I listened to Moby Dick on my MP3 player this past summer while walking. It took a while, but the experience confirmed my theory that many great books shine brightest when read aloud. The problem is finding someone who can READ aloud. My guy with Moby Dick wasn't Derek Jacobi, but after a while I got over his nasal accent and settled into the rhythms of the Pequod.
I'd say many classics--Homer, Virgil, Dante--plead for a rhetor and a willing audience and maybe wine and cheese. Aren't too many of our reading experiences insular and hermetic?
I suppose--to finally respond more directly to Janet's inquiry about the erudition gap--the gap may be there because we have no group to read with. I realize this may sound strange. I used to wonder how anyone read through The Ring and the Book or The Idylls of the King. Now I suspect they were read en famille with mom and dad and aunts and uncles there to explain the hard words, chuckle aloud at the jokes and someone, maybe Uncle Joe--always the first to get a little tipsy-- to repeat the lines aloud and savor them for the group.
Sure Proust may not fit my claim, nor Thomas Pynchon, but I suspect Dickens' chapters were greeted one by one the same way my family
huddles up for new episode of Cummerbund Bandersnatch and Sherlock and the only parts of Finnegans Wake I even remotely get I got from listening online.
|