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Audiobooks helped me find the time to reread T.H. White's magnificent "The Once and Future King"
Topics: The Listener, Audiobooks, Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Once and Future King, T.H. White, Readers and Reading, Our Picks: Books, audible, l.;, Entertainment News
There was a time when rereading seemed a nearly unimaginable luxury to me; with one book review to write per week, plus miscellaneous new books that need to be checked out on top of that, I just didn’t have the time, or the eye-power. I’d long yearned to revisit what I remember as one of the most beautiful books I read in my youth, T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King.” Originally published as four separate novels (the first, “The Sword in the Stone,” was animated by Disney) with a later add-on title, “The Book of Merlin,” this is an unusual epic, the story of King Arthur and his Round Table — material that resonates through Western culture — yet in White’s hands the story is also intimate and even humble.
How sad to think I might never get the chance to revisit it! (The list of older books I plan to read once I “retire” is probably longer than the list of books I’ve already read.) Then I came across the audiobook, an option made irresistible by the fact that it is narrated by Neville Jason, whose sensitive rendering of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” has helped me get past the famous second-book hump in that series of novels. The ideal place to revisit White’s masterpiece: Lying in bed in the dark at night, with my iPhone set to turn itself off in a half hour. Soon, however, I found myself squeezing in bits of listening as I waited for the bus or baked a friend’s birthday cake.
If anything, “The Once and Future King” is more ravishing when read in adulthood, when the seasoned melancholy of the final volumes is all too recognizable. Unsurprisingly, for an author so invested in the English countryside, White made the four main books follow a seasonal pattern. “The Sword in the Stone” relates the childhood of “Wart” and his education under the eccentric wizard, Merlin, a pedagogy that consists of turning the boy into various animals so that he can understand their different approaches to the world and its demands. White loves lists, and Merlin’s house, full of anachronistic collectibles and half-finished science and magical projects (the wizard lives backward in time and has already experienced the future) gives him plenty of opportunity to indulge that passion. Jason, called upon to create vocal characters as diverse as a mad falcon, a scholarly badger and a modest little snake, shines.
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.




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