A choice of recent audiobooks

How do you like a book to be read? There is the way my wife reads to me with her normal, unaccented voice throughout, just as she reads to me from the newspaper, say, letting the words on the page establish in my brain what the author intended — or so we hope.

At the other extreme there is the fully acted and dramatised reading with old voices, foreign accents, all speaking angrily, casually, suspiciously, humorously etc. I hate this sort of reading. I feel irritated and patronised, as if the reader is saying, ‘Obviously you and the author can’t get it together on your own but don’t worry, I am here with my great understanding and dramatic skill, not to say artistry, to deliver the goods; aren’t you lucky? There are of course less extreme modes of reading, but with any but the ‘straight’ there is the danger of a third party, the reader, getting between the author and the listener.