“Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on March 23, 2020.

There are good books and there are great books and there may be a book that is something still more: it is the book of your life. If you’re quite lucky, you may chance upon a novel which inspires so close a kinship that questions of evaluation (Is this book better than merely good? Is it some sort of classic?) become a niggling irrelevance. Luck has everything to do with it. Anyone who cares seriously about fiction eventually will get around to The Brothers Karamazov or Madame Bovary or Don Quixote, and if you’re somebody whose closest literary attachment is to a book of this staple sort, you will not be graced by the particular haunted feeling of good fortune I’m talking about; you will have, instead, the assurance of knowing that your keenest literary pleasures were preordained. One looks differently on the book of genius that, even in a long bookworm’s life, one might never have stumbled upon.
~ Brad Leithauser, (cf. Introduction to Independent People)

My wife, Sue, listens to audio books all the time. I have tried to do so myself a few times over the years and have never managed to enjoy the experience. That was until a few weeks ago when I took advantage of an introductory offer to Audible. Due to timing, the weird COVID circumstances, or  listening this time on a set of nice headphones, this time I have found the whole experience very enjoyable.

I have wondered over the years if my ambivalence toward audio books may have been related to my hearing issues. The birth defect that led many operations as a child to fix my hearing means that listening has never been my go-to way of experiencing things.  It is usually my sense of last resort. Words on a page have always been preferable to human voices. Good headphones it seems have changed that experience, just like they have done with music.

Independent People by Halldor Laxness has been on my to-be-read list for a long time. Over the years, I have purchased copies of it a few times. Each time the volume sits on a shelf un-read until I pass it along. Then a year later I would inevitably find myself at a thrift store or library book sale and there would be another cheap, used copy of the Laxness classic. So I would re-purchase it and then repeat the pattern.

I finally decided two weeks ago that that I would try downloading Independent People, read by Michael Page, with my trial version of Audible. It was a conversion-experience.

First of all, the Icelandic novel about Bjartur of Summerhouses is easily one of the very best novels I have ever “read.” It is at once epic and domestic, universal and parochial. I would, without reservation, recommend it to anyone who loves great literature. It is sweeping and beautiful and tragic and unforgettable.

Second, the experience has changed the way I think about reading and literature. I suddenly now find myself making a list of audiobooks at the library I want to experience read to me, rather than reading them myself. A seismic shift in this reader’s life.