Learning to read again by listening

Concentration shattered? Try this to rediscover the joy of immersion in a book.

19th century portrait of a woman reading (Brooklyn Museum, public domain image)

I am throwing a ball in the dog park for Lola when Mr Guppy goes down on bended knee and proposes to Miss Summerson (“get up from that ridiculous position immediately, sir …”) and I laugh so loudly that I frighten off a nearby Golden Retriever. I am steel-wooling a dirty baking tray in my kitchen when Krook’s mysterious lodger is discovered dead, an opium overdose. I can see, even smell, the dim room, the mean fire, the ragged and filthy bedding, the yellow-faced “unfortunate creature”. I am on my way to the gym when, in a most extraordinary scene, Mr Badger extols the virtues of Mrs Badger’s two previous and very dead husbands, Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo (“both very distinguished men”).

I am in the midst of falling in love with a cast of extraordinary characters … bloviators and dilettantes, scoundrels and charlatans, parasites and paupers … hearing their voices, engaging with their stories.

I am listening and simultaneously overcoming my crisis of concentration and learning to immerse myself in fiction again. And I have discovered the most exceptional of stories that I’ve been dying to tell you about …