The curtains in our Aunt Charlotte’s study came from a Victorian funeral parlour, I kid you not, they smell of dust and incense and lilies. Her apartment has taken on a permanent chill now that winter is setting in, and we keep the dusty curtains drawn most of the time just to try and keep in the heat.

Elizabeth and I still sleep in the one spare bed as neither of us will sleep in our Aunt’s room. We dress each night in clean white cotton Secret Garden night dresses that we found in the wardrobe and curl up like orphans for warmth. We’ve taken to reading to each other until we fall asleep.

I’ve been thinking a lot, as I go through Aunt Charlotte’s things, about ghost voices. As Elizabeth and I read aloud, we become the voices of long dead authors. In my aunts writing, her thoughts are there, and when I read them aloud I become a spectral phonograph conjuring up the electric dead. Funny how each time I re-read a book it seems different, and yet it hasn’t changed, I have. How wonderful and exciting it is to have all these voices, years of thought and ink and paper, bound and shelved and sleeping all around us.

Aunt Charlotte has a lot of books.

I have become addicted to listening to audio books while I am painting, but am so picky about which ones I can listen to. I love the way Elizabeth reads, so delicate, like she is sharing a secret, and with audio books I tend to gravitate towards voices, twoards readers with plummy English voices or people with magical accents. I don’t know why but I can’t seem to listen to pragmatic Canadian or American accents. I also have trouble if the reader sounds nothing like how I imagine the book to be.

There are so many, and I’ve left out autobiography, save one (talk about listening to ghosts!) but here are a few that I’ve worn out from overuse:

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Read by Peter Egan

This is simply the best audio book in our minds, and thusly, out of print. If you can find it, buy it (it will probably be in cassette form) I have been thinking of trying to find who has the rights to it and seeing if we can release it ourselves. Peter Egan not only played Oscar Wilde in a mini-series, he embodies the absolute purple decadence that drips from Mr. Wilde’s prose. Lord when Mr. Egan reads -

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame like as theirs”

Your knees grow weak.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
Jules Verne
Read by Alfred Molina

This sprawling and unabridged version simply drags you in, literally, to the bottom of the sea and fills you with that awesome Victorian wonder that made men travel to the four corners of the earth to kill, plunder and generally make a mess all in the name of god/king or curiosity. Mr. Molina does the poopiest spot on French accent for hours and hours and hours. So worth it just for the lists of rare fish that they marvel at, then kill, then eat.

Dracula
Bram Stoker
Read by Richard E. Grant

I will admit having a total weakness for our Mr. Grant and so will forgive his histrionic vocalizing of Lucy and Mena and horrific Texan accent. Once however, you are past that, this is damn good stuff. The novel flies by and Mr. Grant’s accent is better than pudding.

Orson Welles, The Road To Xanadu
Written and Read by Simon Callow

Ah, Mr. Callow. Simon Callow. Simply the best cameo actor on the planet, the plumiest of plumy accents. Scholar, thespian, wit and writer. This is his book. He does a kick ass Orson Welles.

In The Skin of a Lion/Handwriting/Running In The Family
Written and Read by Michael Ondaatje

I could listen to Mr. Ondaatje read the phone book. These three are pure magic. He whispers and drifts. His voice, his prose, his poetry. Sigh. It is almost too much, but what is too much?

Which brings us to …

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Read by Jeremy Irons

If I could listen to Mr. Ondaatje read the phone book, I could listen to Jeremy Irons read a grocery list, a bus ticket, honestly it doesn’t get any better than this. This, gentle reader, is the book to be lost in. This is English-afile-atio, this is sonorial pornography. Afterwards one craves a cigarette, feels oddly depressed then pads to the kitchen in ones underwear to eat cold leftovers by refrigerator light.