The Audiobook Edition

Dear All,

This is the latest episode of Don’t Press That Button, a newsletter about books and music and movies and cats and baseball and whatnot. As the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons around here. You are doubtless familiar with the euphemism: to press someone’s buttons is to really get on their nerves — very possibly even their last nerve. Now, I’m no scientist, but it seems to me that once you’re down to the bottom of the old nerve supply, or you’ve got someone else down to the bottom of their old nerve supply, that’s not great.

However, I’ve investigated the button below, and all it does is subscribe you to this newsletter. It certainly won’t get on my nerves. If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

My Favorite Audiobook Reader

I was insanely lucky that Marin Ireland agreed to narrate the audiobook of The Curator. She’s a phenomenal actor on screen

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and on stage, of course, but she’s also an unerring book narrator. Maybe the highest compliment that I can make is that, in more than one instance, the choice she made for a particular character’s voice in the novel got me to rethink the way that character sounded in my own head, and it seemed to me that her delivery always made that character more themselves. It’s gratifying to me to see that her work on the book is being praised.

As some of you may know, I’m not just an enthusiast of audio books — cue the Hairclub for Men guy

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— I’m a long-time hobbyist of the form.

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Robin Whitten, the founder and editor of the venerable AudioFile Magazine, recently agreed to chat with me for DPTB, and she reminded me that, while audiobooks are now a thoroughly mainstream way to enjoy books, the industry was pioneered to serve readers who were blind or visually impaired, and it was very much a niche business. There was, Robin noted to me, “a stigma around it at the time.” It was regarded as a secondary method for engaging with a text.

I became familiar with audiobooks in the late eighties because my father listened to them. My dad wasn’t visually-impaired, he just loved having them for drives. In those days, we didn’t call them audiobooks, we called them “books on tape.” They came in these big, plain, squeaky plastic cases that were meant to look like books, but which mostly looked like big, plain, squeaky plastic cases, and inside there would be however many (usually stark white) cassettes. At some point, probably in the early nineties, there started to be small sections in bookstores — sometimes just a spinner rack — with audiobooks in smaller illustrated packages, but the Reagan-era sets were, to the best of my knowledge, primarily intended for libraries.

There were fewer audiobook readers at that time, but my all-time favorite narrator, the late English actor David Case, was a foundational figure, and my father listened to him all the time. Case was incredibly prolific; AudioFile reports that he recorded more than 800 audiobooks! I can’t overstate how important Case’s performance style is to my sense of narrative.

My introduction to him was his reading of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. I heard my father listening to it in his truck, and I was entirely swept away by the sly, crackling energy of Case’s narration. His typical accent was, as his friend and colleague, the fine actor and narrator Simon Vance

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, told me, “a bit posh,” but he had at his disposal a teeming city block-worth of voices to fill out the dialogue of any scene.

I was just revisiting a clip of Case’s performance of High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. If you can give your ear for the first minute of that sample, you’ll be the beneficiary of some Grade A storytelling. That little bite is illustrative of so much of what I love about Case’s narration.

In the scene, Laura is leaving Rob. Notice the contrast between how Case presents Rob’s perspective and Rob’s insights, a tone of wry disbelief that’s set against the congenial voice that he adopts for the character’s dialogue with Laura. Rob wants to carry on as if this isn’t the end of his world, but — and you know this if you’ve read the book — the truth is that he needs Laura in the worst way. His interior voice is trying to distract him from that truth by playing it cool. Meanwhile, Rob’s telling her that she doesn’t have to leave. Case delivers that ebb and flow so stylishly. Then, he quickens for a beat or two when Laura does in fact depart, and the ex-couple does a sad dance in the doorway as she negotiates her way past.

You will sometimes hear it said that a reader brings a story to life. I don’t love that, because to take the example of Nick Hornby’s terrific novel, there’s no shortage of life on the page. I would say rather that a great reader like David Case interprets the work, and he is a spectacular, imaginative interpreter. He plays every part, shading them all, increasing and decreasing the pace depending on the nature of the action, and finding caesuras at certain moments of great weight. It’s a very particular kind of acting that brings out and emphasizes what I think of as the story-ness of a novel. Whenever I listen to David Case, I have the blissful feeling of being in the presence of someone who has a real damned tale to tell me, and a keen plan for how to do it.

I won’t lie to you: I’m writing all this partly because I want to introduce people who might not have heard him to Case’s readings, but chiefly because I wanted an excuse to seek out people who knew him and learn about him. When you consider what an astonishingly productive and successful artist he was, there’s less out there than you might anticipate. His obituary touches briefly on his personal life, on the partner who predeceased him, and on his career in British television. Some crosschecking with his IMDB page reveals some more about the latter, but so far as I can tell, most of the episodes of the shows he appeared in — shows like Z Cars and Scotland Yard — are no longer extant. The one exception is a supporting turn as a stern cafe bartender in a 1962 episode of Maigret

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. Case is entertaining in the part, but it’s a limited role that doesn’t hint at his range. I’ve only come across a couple of photographs of him.

From Robin and Simon, I learned that he was an avid gardener, and that he was actually quite softspoken, and that he knew how to have a good time, but there wasn’t a whole lot else about Case that they could reveal. And that’s all right. His art is enough — more than enough.

Simon did share a small anecdote that I found touching. He described how Case once showed him where he did his recording: “a sort of little closet in the hallway of his San Francisco home.” I can visualize David Case all alone in his house in the early morning, in the quiet of that tiny hall recording booth, reading into his microphone, performing for himself before anyone else. That image is so spellbinding to me. I only wish I could be there, listening in.

As I mentioned above, Case narrated a huge number of books, so if you are looking for a place to start I’d suggest either High Fidelity or The Forsyte Saga. You’ll find that some of his recordings, ones that I assume were made earlier on, sound unfortunately tinny, but those two are full and warm.

Finally, thanks to Robin Whitten and Simon Vance for giving the time to speak with me.

The Latest

• I chatted with Joe Donahue of WAMC about The Curator. Joe’s one of the most insightful interviewers around, and it was a pleasure.

• The book received a lovely review from Chronogram.

• I have resupplied Oblong Books with signed, stamped copies if you would like to get one.

• And, it was a thrill to see Dexter Palmer’s wonderful take on the book arrive in ink.

  

Recommendations

• Baseball. It was already glorious, but the new rules initiating a pitch clock and limiting the shift have restored some of the action that’s been lost over the last decade or so.

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  Go see a game!

• Back to audiobooks, though: I very much appreciated Don Van Natta’s Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias as read by Hillary Huber. Huber is another of my favorite audiobook readers, and she excels here with a number of distinct dialogue voices. (I’m not generally too interested in golf, for what it’s worth, but Didrikson Zaharias is a fascinating figure.)

• George Guidall is another titan of the audiobook field, and you can’t do better than his pairing with Jonathan Franzen’s classic The Corrections.

• Finally, my former neighbor and forever pal, the demon who introduced me to Strat-o-Matic Baseball, Greg Baglia, is not only a marvelous actor and voice-over artist, but also a sparkling audiobook narrator. Greg really spreads his wings on this recording of Steve Rushin’s memoir, Nights in White Castle.

As always, my thanks for subscribing, and in case you ever have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I’m over on Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there.

All Best,

Owen

1. Check out the film Sparrows Dance, which is a lovely jewel box of a movie that features a tremendous lead performance by Marin.

2. I just conducted a (very) cursory investigation regarding the statue on the shelf behind Sy Sperling and, no, as you probably guessed, it doesn’t appear that he ever won an actual Oscar, but I’m sure he helped some Oscar winners.

3. Jen, who copy edits this newsletter, has been my friend for twenty-plus years. We were dorm room neighbors. She recalls that before we really knew each other, she would hear me through the wall, talking to myself in various voices, and wondered if I was crazy. I was recording a book on tape.

4. I encourage you to check out Simon’s recording of the masterful Sarah Waters novel The Little Stranger. Superb!

5. In black-and-white shows and films I find that there is inevitably an actor who bears an unnerving resemblance to a contemporary actor. In this episode of Maigret, there are two: “Kirby” is a dead ringer for a young Dominic West and “Radek” looks an awful lot like Keith Gordon. They’re both terrific, which makes sense since immortality has given them plenty of time to hone their craft, and this is a fun show.

6. I don’t endorse the “ghost runner” rule, however. The less said about that, the better.