I’ve done The Education of Henry Adams.

You might think that this should go without saying for someone in my job, and you’d be right. But I’m afraid that more than once, I told people I’d read The Education of Henry Adams, when, in fact, I hadn’t. The first of these was the college history professor who assigned me the book; I gave it a mildly diligent try, only to be scared off by the levels of irony I sensed. They disturbed the transparent prose the way that heat rising from the hood of a car ripples a summer vista. This guy was too smart for me.

Several times in recent years, I resolved to go back to it, but by then, like every other middle-aged person I’d regarded with amused condescension from the spacious afternoons of my late adolescence, I had become “too busy to read as much as I’d like.”

But now, this state has been greatly ameliorated. I didn’t, strictly speaking, read The Education of Henry Adams; I listened to it, as I have a great many books recently. The process is surprisingly easy: You consult a catalogue issued by a recorded-book company, call in (or fax or write) your choice of title, and give a credit-card number, and, in a few days, you receive a neat box of cassettes in the mail. When you’re through, you put the cassettes back in the box and drop it into a mailbox. Then you can order the next book. I think you will, too.

For some years, I’d felt cordial to these rental companies because they advertised with us. Still, the whole process seemed cumbersome and rather pointless to me. Why go through this postal rigmarole when you can just pick up a book?

Then I found myself regularly having to make two of the most aggravating drives on the North American continent—Manhattan to Eastern Long Island, Manhattan to New Jersey, so I thought I’d give audio books a try.

Instant relief, as they used to say in commercials. With one of those cassettes spooling away, no traffic imbecility on the Long Island Expressway could vex me; the still more horrible approach to the Holland Tunnel became benign, even appealing. When you’re listening to a book, you don’t feel the gnawing of wasted time.

But there’s more to it than that. The books in the catalogues that the companies issue are, in effect, always in print. If it weren’t for Books on Tape, Inc., I’m sure I would never have known about an uncommonly good trilogy of novels by Elleston Trevor charting England’s changing fortunes in the Second World War: The Big Pickup (rescue from calamity at Dunkirk), Squadron Airborne (a week among fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain), and The Killing Ground (tanks make their way up from the beach at Normandy). All three of these are history at its finest and most