For most works of literature in most circumstances, a fully sighted reader who is not in a car or on foot should be reading rather than hearing... talking stories ultimately risk an infantilisation of literature: a vision of a Britain full of grown-ups having stories read to them; books that, exacerbating the babying, will often be the Harry Potter novels. Adults should read grown-up stories to themselves. The best reading - always - takes place without a sound to be heard.
Right. I am not going to type a string of expletives but this idiotic view - tellingly he can't resist mentioning Harry Potter - demeans the experience of literature almost as much as a refusal to read at all. Art is not an obligation or a test - it is a bounty, it's an enrichment of life. It's not about proving who you are to other people. It's about... oh, you know anyway, even if that idiot Lawson doesn't.
I mainly listen to novels when I am walking, but is it so bad to listen to them when I am doing housework? What's wrong with wanting to close my eyes and hear Michael Sheen read Kubla Khan? Are people who listen to Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 thus infantilised?
ooh, it's enough to make you write a strongly worded letter to the Guardian
ETA - but in fact I registered with the Guardian online thing and posted a cross comment
