“Some people can’t hear the written word enough, perhaps because it invokes memories of our earliest literary experience, that of the parent reading to us at bedtime, filling our sleepy heads with Gothic castles and death-defying escapes and Moomins that then swirled about in there after the light went out,” observes Stuart Walton. “Others, though, resent it, possibly for much the same reason, that it seems to return you to a helpless, infantile state where you couldn’t just read books for yourself.”

In a story for The Guardian, Walton points to some great, online audio tracks of famous writers reading their work (T.S Eliot, Sylvia Plath’s, W. H. Auden) as well as samples of “interpreters” (a.k.a., actors) reading famous works (John Gielgud reading Andrew Marvell), to consider the question, “Is anything gained from reading aloud?”

Walton’s conclusion? “There is one immense and tangible benefit to me from listening to literature, rather than reading it for yourself, which is that, just sometimes, the voice you are hearing is better at the job than the one inside you.”