Snapshots of the city

Six CDs, 75 minutes each
www.csaword.co.uk

Lying stock-still with a bandage over your eyes for several weeks has its bonuses. In the bookshelves downstairs sit all those spines that for years have been gazing at you reproachfully, pleading ‘when are you going to take me down and read me?’ Help is at hand. You don’t have to exhaust the eyes staring at their type. You can be read to. Ever since my father would read aloud, usually Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, every evening in winter to anyone who wanted to listen, I have loved being read to. So what better thing to do than to plug into talking-book cassettes (which must be unabridged)? I started with Proust, appropriately, because lying there in bed it was as if I were the author himself, immersed in his world. It was read by someone apparently capable of taking enough breath for a two-page-long sentence.