Russell Hoban: Good Enough to Give You Shivers

Like a boy, I still have wishes. For a long time I have wished that someone would do an audio version of Riddley Walker, one of the great books of the 20th century. Set in Britain in the distant future, after a nuclear catastrophe, the novel is written in a cunningly invented English that assumes well-nigh hypnotic power as the book progresses: "Stoans want to be lissent to. Them big brown stoans in the formers feal they want to stan up and talk like men. Some times youwl see them lying on the groun with ther humps and hollers theywl say to you, Sit a wyl and res easy why dont you." Whenever I read that passage, I think of my wife, Wendy, and I wish we could listen together—with our eyes closed, maybe—to a reader so skillful that we wouldn't even be aware of him: the words, tumbling after one another, would seem to be speaking themselves.