There is a short piece about Chris right after the beginning. Note that it includes an extract of him reading William Wilberforce’s speech on abolishing slavery – so if you do listen to it, be prepared to hear Chris’s voice! I rather liked hearing him – though I’m feeling a bit damp-eyed now.

Someone told me of your death, Heraclitus. It brought tears to my eyes. I remembered the many times that you and I had sat up talking late into the night. But now you, my dear friend from Halicarnassos, have been a pile of ashes for a long time. And yet your poems live on still. Death, which seizes everything, cannot lay its hands on those.

It struck me quite forcibly that if you changed the names, Heraclitus/ Christopher,  Halicarnassus/ Malvern; and updated “poems” to “blog posts and/or Librivox recordings”, then the same sentiments are as true today as they were over 2000 years ago.  That was an interesting and surprisingly comforting insight to have in the middle of the night.

The challenge, as a reader, is to find suitable voices for these rather unpleasant people. I made the decision early on that Dorian’s voice wouldn’t change throughout the book, to reflect the unnatural preservation of his body while the depiction in the portrait becomes more and more dissolute. I try to make Lord Henry sound bored and drawling, pleased with himself, purring like a cat with cream, or maybe even with a mouse. It has been a long time since I recorded chapter 5, so I was very glad that I kept some samples of how the main characters were voiced.

Now that I have re-broken the ice, I hope to be recording much more in the coming days. I have another long project on the go, the letters of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, in which I am reading the part of Robert, and a colleague on LibriVox, russiandoll, is reading the part of Elizabeth. This is a much larger work, and will take a lot more effort, but the individual letters are much shorter than normal chapters, so they make nice fill-in reading for when I can’t manage anything more substantial.

All that, and I had a long chat over a coffee with an old friend: a good day.

We are therefore asking for donations to help with funding

• hosting costs for the main LibriVox site, which is where all co-ordination happens, and all information about the project is kept. It doesn’t include the hosting of our audio files, for which we remain indebted to Archive.org.
• a site redesign to improve accessibility
• an easier-to-use catalogue for our readers
• improvements to the management software, to help the admins do their job more smoothly.

We aim to raise $20,000 which we hope will cover our costs for the next four and a half years. Donations are being collected for us by Archive.org, as we don’t have our own means of taking them. We will close the account as soon as we reach our target. If you can help, please donate something to our project, even if it is only a small amount. We, and all the people who listen to the audiobooks we produce, will be tremendously grateful. Thank you.

Richard and David have fetched shopping and prescriptions, driving through nasty conditions to do so, when Gillian felt that she couldn’t safely leave me on my own. A lifeline, to say the least. Just this morning, too, Elspeth and Will took Gillian on a shopping trip which meant that we would be able to eat fresh food, cooked from scratch, rather than from tins or the freezer.

Richard (a different one) offered us the use of his parents’ flat, which is a lot nearer the hospital where I’ll be getting the majority of the chemotherapy. It will be a real comfort to know that we have that resource available, which will make that aspect of the treatment a lot less trying. Beyond that, Richard has been a great telephone conversationalist, in spite of going through some fairly trying troubles of his own. He is a true friend, who I value immensely.

I have been the subject of a torrent of emails, phone calls, cards, presents and good wishes from both Gillian’s and my own family. Janet went to enormous trouble to devise menus over the New Year so that I would be able to join in the celebrations as far as I could. That meant an awful lot to me.

The wise, warm, loving, enthusiastic community at LibriVox (my main online hangout) has been great. They have sent support, good wishes and prayers. I’m looking forward immensely to getting back to work there.

Most important, as you will have already gathered by now, is Gillian. She hates cooking, but has cooked for me, even raw meat and fish. She loathes driving, but has driven me to more hospital appointments than I can remember, through some frightening conditions. She has held my head when I vomited, and generally dealt with all the ick and yuck with immense fortitude. She talks with me when I want to talk, and leaves me alone when I’m unaccountably antisocial. She has taken over hated housework duties that I gladly took on when I was made redundant, but can no longer manager at the moment. In short, she has been my rock. I love you and I thank you.

Thank you also to all the people I’ve mentioned and to those not mentioned. You know who you are, and I’m very grateful to all of you.

There may be a short hiatus, while I am in the hospital for my first chemotherapy, which starts tomorrow. Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

I remembered the book from the 1970′s BBC TV series that I watched as a child. I particularly remembered the scene where Flashman, the school bully, roasts Tom in front of an open fire. But although the struggle against a bullying culture is a large part of the book’s message, I was surprised to realize that it’s main message was the growth of a normal, English boy into an English man.

The opening chapters deal with Tom’s early childhood, and describe country life in the Vale of the White Horse. The people we see there are held up as examples of good, honest working folk, the best that England can produce. The author certainly does not approve of modern customs.

Tom is sent to Rugby, a public school, and we find that he is no better than average at his lessons, but masterful at getting into and out of trouble: he comes home late after a long run; he falls foul of a gamekeeper and a local farmer; and he is involved in a famous fight. The School’s headmaster despairs of him, but he hatches a plan to pair Tom with a “good” boy who will need his protection, and so we meet George Arthur.

For me, this is where the book loses a great deal of its fun. It becomes a catalogue of virtuous behaviour as Tom learns to try properly at his lessons instead of using a crib, to pray nightly as he was taught, and to value honesty and “Christian” manliness. My strong impression is that this second part of the book represents the meat of what Thomas Hughes has to say to us. I found it more than a little priggish and proselytising, and was made distinctly uncomfortable by the overtly Christian message. For instance, one of the scenes that had the greatest effect on Tom was talking with Arthur , who had narrowly survived a bout of fever. The dream that Arthur recounts isn’t at all subtle in its portrayal of Christian ideals, and yet it strongly affected Tom. It would have had me sticking two fingers down my throat if I’d been in Tom’s position.

Nevertheless, I am glad I did re-visit this book. I now have a much deeper appreciation of what it really is. And most importantly, I have a deep pride in what I have made.

Erotica, my arse! This is pornography plain and simple. The characters barely attain two dimensions, even Fanny herself. Most are thin and sketchy, and little more than caricatures. Good characters are all uniformly good looking, and give Fanny a good time sexually, while bad characters are ugly, and they bore and pain her. Worst of all, to my mind, is Fanny’s intolerance of male homosexuality, even though she is thwarted in her attempts to have the only two men she ever sees together arrested for their “crime”.

I didn’t like this book at all. I finished it, just. I made the effort to finish it in tribute to the LibriVox readers who volunteered their time, and partly also because it is so well known that there must be something to it. I kept hoping that there would be more to the book than mere titillation, but the story finished before the quality arrived. My loss. Don’t let it be yours. This book is a warning that notoriety is not a good reason to read a book.

Verdict: no (and only just escaped being a NO).

The poem is written in iambic pentameters. A long time ago I learned to scan Latin poetry, so I thought I knew about this: mixtures of spondees (DUM DUM) and dactyls (DUM DI-DI). I was stunned to find that almost every foot was a spondee or a trochee (DUM DI). When I thought about English doggerel, however, with its characteristic dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum rhythm (recall Hiawatha!) I realized that my preconceptions were just that, and that I should discard them.

But I did look through the poem, just to be sure I knew how to read it, and I found a couple of lines where an odd or archaic pronunciation would be necessary to keep the meter. For example the first two lines are

The frost performs its secret ministry
Unhelped by an wind. The owlet’s cry …

in which the word unhelped must be pronounced with three syllables instead of two to keep the meter of the line intact. Interspersed was similar, requiring four, not three syllables. Imagine me now muttering the poem with my fingers beating on the desk in time with each syllable, as I checked every single word to see whether I should say any more of them in that odd way. I found these: populous, numberless, fluttering, and articulate I said with only two syllables each; tower had only one syllable. There were a few others, but you get the picture.

The other challenge in reading the poem was to prevent myself from reading it line by line instead of in meaningful phrases.

What I’ve described makes it seem as though reading the poem was quite an effort, and you’d be right, it was. But I actually found the effort well worth it. By spending so much time on it, and thinking about how I was going to read it aloud, I found that I understood it so much better than I did on first reading. I thought at first it was a little rambling and pointless; by the end I appreciated the circular route the poet had taken, and understood his desire for his child to have a better life than he had had.

It was definitely a positive experience for me, one I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t decided to volunteer at LibriVox. In fact, even when I did volunteer I never imagined I would read poetry, and still less did I imagine that I would enjoy it. Thanks Hugh.

Part of the reason for making this record is to encourage me to think about my reactions to the book. I’ll summarize the text, without spoilers if that is relevant, and then I’ll say whether or not I liked the book. I’ll allow myself four levels of liking:

• N(O!) – I hated it, it’s a surprise that I finished it, if indeed I did.
• n(o) – I didn’t like it, and I may not have finished it.
• y(es) – not bad, but not one of my favourites.
• Y(ES!) – great! I’ll almost certainly re-read this one day and I’ll probably recommend it to friends.

This week’s book is Thornyhold, by Mary Stewart. Geillis (pronounced “Jillis” I think) is the daughter of a clergyman, who was generally unhappy as a child, with only a few bright spots: a short-lived pet; and the very infrequent visits of a magical “sponsor” (what else do you call an irreligious Godmother?) after whom Geillis is named.

When Geillis the sponsor dies, she leaves her cottage Thornyhold to our heroine, who moves into the house and finds the peace and joy that she lacked while growing up. She also discovers that a puzzle has been bequeathed with the house. With the help of a friendly boy, Will, and his father, and a cat called Hodge, Geillis tackles the puzzle and begins to live happily. Will she live happily ever after? The page I linked to, at my local library, lists the book’s genre as Romantic Suspense, so I don’t want to give away the ending.

I loved the book, and devoured it in only a couple of days. I liked Geillis’s indomitable spirit, which she maintained even after a thoroughly dispiriting early life. The magical moments felt plausible but dreamlike, and were a temporary respite from the awfulness that left me hoping for better for her. But the suspense was carefully handled so I wasn’t sure of the outcome until the dénouement, which was satisfying. I have no hesitation in giving it my top mark: Y