So after Hollander and Hecht paused to sip water during their poetry readings — each remarking that the poet Randall Jarrell had once observed that “sipping water during a poetry reading was the single most pretentious thing a poet can do,” Hudgins decided to do them one better. When it was his turn to read, Hudgins held up a glass of water, repeated Jarrell’s admonishment, then “speculated that Jarrell might not have known there is a pretentious side of the glass and a non-pretentious side.”

He showed the crowd which side was which, and asked if they knew why the far side of the glass was the unpretentious side. Then he tipped that side to his mouth, and let the water pour “out the lower lip of the glass and down my shirt and pants.”

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Anyway, by now you probably already know that Rosemary, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler's marvelous and justly celebrated new novel, "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," was raised, until the age of 5, with a chimpanzee "sister" named Fern. Rosemary begins her story in the middle, recalling the course of a few months in 1996 when she was as an undergraduate at the University of California at Davis. During this period, Rosemary made and lost a new friend; saw her brother, a fugitive from the law, for the first time in 10 years; was arrested twice and finally learned to face the truth about what happened to Fern. Fern's non-human nature isn't explicitly spelled out until a third of the way through the novel, but knowing about it in advance only makes the complexities of Rosemary's relationship to her feel richer from the very start.

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The audiobook editions have been slower to appear, but in the last three weeks, 10 of these books were quietly released in audio editions. They range from crucial foundational volumes such as “Distant Star” and “Amulet,” novels that are very much in conversation with the other major works of fiction (“By Night in Chile,” “Nazi Literature in the Americas,” “The Savage Detectives” and “2666”), to strange outliers including “The Skating Rink,” a relatively weak early novel, and two slight and previously unknown novels, “The Third Reich” and “Woes of the True Policeman,” which were discovered and published posthumously by Bolaño’s estate in the wake of the success of “2666.”

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Take George Guidall's performance of Helene Wecker's new novel, "The Golem and the Jinni." The book is set among the immigrant communities of 1899 New York. Two creatures from folklore, a golem and a djinn (or genie, or jinni, as Wecker renders the word), find themselves living in the Jewish and Syrian quarters, respectively, trying to pass themselves off as human beings. The golem, designed by a master sorcerer to pass for a real woman, is at radically loose ends; the man she was created to serve dies in the Atlantic crossing. The jinni has been accidentally freed from a long imprisonment in a tin flask, but remains trapped in human form. The tinker who releases him, and an elderly rabbi who recognizes the golem for what she is, act as guides to the new world for the two central characters.

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This is a cause for celebration, because Anton Chekhov has in many ways become an abstraction useful for describing the work of other writers. There is no higher superlative, in some quarters, than to say a writer is “the American Chekhov” or “our Chekhov” or “Chekhovian.” What this seems to mean is that the writer is attuned to the subtleties of human behavior, that the writer does not proclaim loudly upon everything all the time, that the writer is restrained in the use of language, that the writer is civil and just, that the writer is measured, that the writer is in some way indescribable, that there is a magic somewhere in the flat surface that is best left unexamined, because to describe it mechanically would be to diminish it.

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The Southern Vampire Mysteries -- which began in 2001 with "Dead Until Dark," and continued through 13 novels with hard-to-keep-straight titles and a dozen or so short stories and novellas -- is comfort reading of superior quality, made even more endearing by the series' longtime audiobook narrator Johanna Parker. As the series title suggests, these books, while typically shelved in the romance section, are actually whodunits. In each volume some annoying minor character gets killed, and by the end the culprit has been nabbed: serviceable plots, these, but certainly not the source of the series' charm.

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On commutes like mine, the natural competitor of the audiobook is the podcast, and more than once I’ve turned off an audiobook in favor of “WTF with Marc Maron,” the twice-weekly podcast in which the stand-up comic and former Air America radio host interviews other comics, actors, musicians and writers. Maron now has a new memoir, "Attempting Normal," and naturally, the audiobook version cracks the form wide open, with features the hardcover can't match.

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It's the story of Colville and Francine, each around 30 years old and former childhood friends. Francine has married, and is expecting her first child in suburban Boise, Idaho. Colville lives in a trailer but turns up on Francine's doorstep when a news story about a neighbor's missing child mysteriously inspires him to seek her out.

What Colville and Francine share, and what Francine's apprehensive husband, Wells, can begin to fathom, is their past as members of a reclusive religious sect planning for the imminent end of the world. Francine's father helped build the underground compound where the sect expected to ride out a nuclear holocaust, and Colville's beloved younger brother was regarded as a chosen one, destined for some great mission. (Instead, he became a soldier and was killed in Afghanistan.) How exactly the sect fell apart is revealed gradually, and the novel's action culminates in striking passages describing a visit to the groups now-deserted subterranean shelter.

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John Keating's narration of Jim Crace's "Harvest" falls into the latter category. His eminently pleasant voice, with an Irish lilt that he turns up and down at will, is more or less the same whatever book he's reading. In the case of "Harvest," a deceivingly simple account of the implosion of a small rural community, it is exactly the right voice to convey a story with some of the qualities of a fairy tale. Small things here have big meanings, and Keating, who imparts the flavor of a bedtime story to the proceedings, adds to the novel's archetypal resonance.

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These titles make big promises. Implicit in them is the notion that the reader is not only going to get the science and the prurience, but also (Stiff, Spook, Bonk) a fair acquaintance with good humor, wordplay and the music language can make. When these promises pay off – and in Roach’s books, they always do – it’s more pleasure than learning, which is an extraordinary thing to say about books so packed with previously esoteric information hard won by research.

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Or so I thought until I stumbled upon Guy Gavriel Kay's "Under Heaven," a bewitching tale set in the invented country of Kitai, which is closely patterned after Tang Dynasty China. It was a meeting shaped by audiobooks, since what I was looking for when I found it was a long multi-character story read by my favorite narrator, Simon Vance. Vance has taken me through a dozen books by Anthony Trollope, the entire "A Dance to the Music of Time" sequence by Anthony Powell and miscellaneous other novels by Dickens, Hilary Mantel and V.S. Naipaul. To my ear, he strikes exactly the right balance between distinct characters and the unified sensibility of a third-person omniscient narrator. When I crave the pleasure of being entirely enveloped in the imaginary world of a long novel, I want Vance to read it to me.

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For anyone interested in epic adventure tales, Laura Miller recommends “Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm,” a study of Paul du Chaillu, an explorer whose remarkable journey is part Charles Darwin, part Indiana Jones:

"This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world."

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This problem – the desire to get closer, down in the trenches of the daily life of a person who belongs to a world not one’s own – can never find its solution in television, because the medium is too distorting, and there is too much money at stake to offer the kind of screen time that a closer look would require, and, anyway, the presence of the documentary cameras would change the behavior of everyone involved so much that any hope for closeness would be dashed.

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The framing device of this novel is a self-help manual, but it's easy to make way too much of that. Hamid pretends to tell "you," a young man born in a poor village in what appears to be Pakistan, advice on how to parlay "your" natural talents into wealth amid a society of breathtaking ruthlessness and striving. Of course, chances are close to nil that you are such a person, or that you've picked up this book looking for any such advice. Rather, the self-help feint allows Hamid to smoothly adopt the second-person -- a writerly choice that usually registers as painfully self-conscious or presumptuous (see: "Bright Lights, Big City").

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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.

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Laura Miller dug into Candida Moss' scholarly work on Christianity's obsession with martyrdom, titled "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom." She writes:

"Moss is thorough, strives for clarity and is genuinely fired up in her concern for the influence of the myth of martyrdom on Western societies. 'The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later,' she writes. This was, significantly, a period during which the church had become 'politically secure,' thanks to Constantine. Yet, instead of providing a truthful account of Christianity’s early years, the scholars and clerics of the fourth century cranked out tales of horrific, systemic violence. These stories were subtly (and not so subtly) used as propaganda against heretical ideas or sects. They also made appealingly gruesome entertainment for believers who were, personally, fairly safe; Moss likens this to contemporary suburbanites reveling in a horror film."

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The ease of an audiobook can sometimes nudge a foot-dragging reader over these inexplicable hurdles. I've been intending to read the novels of Charles Portis for ages. Everything I'd heard about this "writers' writer" suggested his books would delight me. I loved both film versions of his best-known novel, "True Grit," and my most discerning friends swear by the rest. Donna Tartt, author of "The Secret History" and "The Little Friend," rhapsodized about "True Grit" in an afterword included in an edition published in the mid-2000s, describing it as one of "the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime."

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In a similar, if more elevated, vein, a BBC dramatization of the four Ford Madox Ford novels collectively known as "Parade's End" will arrive on American television at the end of the month. (HBO will air the miniseries beginning on Feb. 26.) The screenplay is by Tom Stoppard, and Benedict Cumberbatch, of "Sherlock" fame, stars. "Downton" comparisons will abound, though some viewers will be disappointed to find "Parade's End" lacks a mansion and wisecracking old ladies -- not to mention the complete absence of attention paid to the servant class.

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