You can hear it here. I only listened to a few minutes, because I have already read this story way too many times to be able to spend half an hour listening to it, but those few minutes seemed pretty good. I think the story has a voice, tone and structure that lends itself well to narration (and Kate Baker is, reputedly, a very good narrator).

I feel bad that this blog has just been all self-congratulatory squibs since the end of December, but, hey, I’ve been busy. I’m still in Madrid, doing…things. I’m also reading Middlemarch. It is really, really, really good. I think it might be the most engrossing book I’ve read since War And Peace. I just keep reading and reading and reading and even though there’s still more to read, I’m actually  happy that I’m not done with it yet.

How do all these things keep getting past me? I was just reading the novel because it’s on all those lists of classics. I don’t think I’ve ever seen (or heard of, or read about) a single person saying that this book is unmissable. Like, how is it that I can have three dozen people tell me to read the new China Mieville or Catherynne Valente novel but can have exactly zero people tell me, “Hey, Middlemarch is really good. You definitely need to go read it right now”. Is there some corner of the internet where people work hard to distinguish between the stale classics (like, I dunno…Rousseau’s Confessions) and the ones that are still blazingly alive? Or did all the other people who care about this stuff just go and major in English in college and, hence, arrive into maturity already in full possession of this sort of knowledge (to them, I say….well…I sure do know alot about supply and demand).