I’m listening to an audio book. Does that mean I’m cheating?

Some books just sound better this way.

October 15, 2026 — 4:25am

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“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive”, the narrator, Richard Papen, discloses in Donna Tartt’s 1992 campus-thriller, The Secret History. I’m familiar with that line, and with many lines in The Secret History, because I listened obsessively to the audiobook, read by Tartt herself, during the COVID lockdowns.

The Secret History is a gothic novel about an exclusive group of Classics students at a university in Vermont and their adventures in Dionysian ritual and murder. Critic James Wood called it “swoonily compulsive”. Reading the book is a kind of Dionysian experience in its own right; its world of intellectual glamour, old money and verdant seclusion seems to intoxicate the author as much as the narrator and the intended reader. I first read it over one gloriously swoony weekend aged 17.

Many years later, it was the perfect audiobook as I stomped through the freezing streets of locked-down Melbourne. I listened........

© Brisbane Times