Do You Read Me?

This month Olly Mann is excited to embark upon realising a life-long dream

- Olly Mann

TODAY, I’VE BEEN recording an audiobook. That’s an exciting sentence to write; partly because, after eight hours of talking into a mic, writing anything provides a welcome break from talking. But also because— long before I ever heard the word audiobook—it’s something that I aspired to do.

At primary school, for instance, I vividly recall waiting with breathless anticipation to take my turn reading out a paragraph of The Ladybird Book of Cars, or some equally thrilling tome. The little hardback would be passed around the classroom, each child clumsily blundering through their allocated text before chucking the book at the pupil on their left.

I realised, of course, that the point of the exercise was to monitor our literacy and comprehension—not to entertain our fellow classmates, most of whom were busy flicking bogeys at each other. Nonetheless, I always performed my paragraph as if it were the sermon on the mount.

At my secondary school, students were encouraged to put themselves forward to select and present a reading at morning talk—a twice-weekly assembly—and I often added my name to the list. The school was non-denominational, so there was no expectation of piety: in fact, I went out of my way to push boundaries of taste. I once relished delivering a list of the average sizes of male genitalia from The Mackeson Book Of Averages, and, on another occasion, highlighted some racist fancy dress advice I’d found in an 1940s edition of The Girls Companion in the school library, hoping to embarrass the headteacher into buying some new books.