You’d think that recording an almost 400-page book aloud would be boring and dull. Not a bit of it; it’s electrifying and great fun. (Hope that comes through in the audio). One is reading one’s favorite book, of course; that helps. And it’s surprisingly hard work…you really have to dig in. First of all, you have to realize how hard it may be to hear what you are reading. It’s not like face-to-face speech, where the listener can extrapolate. Or even big public speaking events, of which I have done a ton. You have to bite off your consonants or it will be incomprehensible. I have listened to my early efforts and they were painfully hard to follow. You have to slow way down, and you have to enunciate very clearly. Enunciation wasn’t that tough but slowing down…not so easy. So there’s that.

At the same time, one of my alleged gifts as a writer is that my “voice” always sounds personal, intimate. Dunno why but everyone says so. You truly don’t want to lose that with too much careful enunciation or too slow a pace. That’s tricky.

Finally, this is a performance…a dramatization. You’re telling a story and that has to come across or you might as well not bother. Anyhow, the upshot is that you really have to concentrate. I still loved it. I am shamefully fond of the book (and the language in particular) so it wasn’t hard to loll around in it for a few days. Hope it’s fun for the listener. Oughta be. BTW, the photo is of me, Graham, the recording expert, and his superb dog, to whom I became close.