I am listening to Tom Jones on Audible. I was very pleasantly surprised how FUNNY it is.
When I think of the English I think of tea, a nation of shop keepers, and a nation which engaged in global imperialism with more success than any nation in history.
And I think of wit. It is their conspicuous grace, in my personal opinion, and I lived there 6 months (3 in Oxford, which is a story I won’t tell; interestingly, since I was there more than three months in the Mad Cow period I am prohibited from donating blood by the Red Cross).
Here is a definition of wit: the dexterous use of words to build space within a confined social prison. Prison may be too strong, but wit makes the room lighter, larger, and everyone in it more beautiful and charming, simply because you are laughing.
Humor, as I have said before, roughly equals it. It creates a middle area in which contentious issues–things that make us mad and uncomfortable–can be discussed in new ways. This is why Cancel Culture, on balance, makes people emotionally imbecilic. Chronic anger is infantile monosyllabism. It is a one note tune, devoid of charm, grace, and SPACE. It is a tight cage.
And I will comment, as I have somewhere before, that LISTENING to, particularly, British fiction is a fundamentally different experience that reading it. The readers appropriate the accents, and are skilled actors in their own rights, and their performances very much become a part of the overall experience.
I noticed this with Shakespeare a long time ago. By all means READ him, but listen to him at the same time. I promise you that you will get more out of it, even if you have to often pause and reread certain passages. That time is well spent, the effort eminently pleasurable.
This applied, for me, even to listening to the 127 hour Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That took me six months.
But don’t just think of “books on tape” as an efficient use of time. It is worth pouring a glass of wine, lighting a cigar, and listening at home.