My new obsession.

For years my aunt has waxed enthusiastic about her “books on tape” from the library, but it wasn’t until I happened to notice a CD version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy at my own public library this spring that I too got sucked into the sisterhood. It took about ten minutes. Seduced by Rob Inglis’s masterful narration, I became an instant audiobook-ophile. I devoured all three Tolkien books in quick succession, rushing to my car on my lunch breaks and sitting too long in the driveway at home, loath to turn off the stereo before Legolas and Aragorn or Frodo and his devoted Sam extricated themselves from whatever fresh predicament had befallen them. I haven’t listened to NPR in months!

I’ve just finished listening to a fantastic book called The Golden Ocean, a swashbuckling fictional account of Commodore Anson’s historic circumnavigation of the globe back in the early 1740s – complete with scurvy, shipwrecks and pieces of eight – told from the point of view of a young Irishman (and narrated brilliantly by a John Franklyn-Robbins). Avast, ahoy, ye swabbies! I ejected the last disc with the greatest reluctance and immediately went in search of more nautical books by Patrick O’Brian. Fortunately there are a lot.

I love when reading, or in this case listening to a book ignites a hunger for new knowledge. After reading Delta Wedding this summer, I ransacked Wikipedia and Google for everything I could find about Eudora Welty. Same thing with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, an entrancing comedy of manners from a direct (literary) descendant of Jane Austen. As soon as I finished the book I had to watch the BBC miniseries, because I just wasn’t ready to let go. Movies will do it, too. After I saw Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, I brought home a pile of books about the Elizabethan era.

And a whole new obsession was launched earlier this year when Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent, a book about perfume (previously a topic of only passing interest), led me to The Emperor of Scent, about fragrance master Luca Turin and his revolutionary theory of smell, and then in turn to Turin’s own vastly entertaining Perfumes: The Guide, and then inexorably to the perfume counters of Nordstrom and Sephora, where I proceeded to spend lots of money.